Frequently granted the nebulous title “first modern war,” the War Between the States is also credited with birthing a multitude of maiden events. Most of these distinctions are misplaced, as the war enhanced far more than it created.
The Crimean War (1853–56) witnessed the first use of railroads and telegraphy in military operations as well as the pioneering of organized nursing. Photographers made a handful of exposures during the Mexican War (1846–48). Free blacks and slaves fought in the American Revolution (1775–83). The French employed dog tags in the early 1800s and balloon reconnaissance in the early 1700s. Rifles, grenades, land mines, and multibarreled “machine guns” had been around since the Middle Ages.1
Conversely, the Civil War was not the last of many things. Slavery remained for years in Cuba and Brazil and never ended in areas of Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. In the 1950s all eleven states of the former Confederacy maintained laws of segregation. In the later decades of the twentieth century, citizens of Kansas, California, and Hawaii contemplated seceding from the Union.
Yet the war was still a vanguard event in a few cases. The following were the first of their kind in American or world history. They are ranked chronologically, although their impact upon the war and the world is left to the reader’s imagination.
1. First National Income Tax in American History (August 5, 1861)
It must have been a bitter pill for states’ rights advocates. The price of secession included the creation of a first-ever national income tax, both for the United States and the Confederacy.2
The first siphoning came from the U.S. government, enacted four months into the war. It was a dream by today’s standards. In order to increase revenue, Congress imposed a tax of 3 percent on all yearly income above eight hundred dollars, an amount well above the annual revenues for most farmers and laborers. In 1862 a new plan taxed cigarettes, liquor, stamps, inheritance, and a mountain of other items. It also expanded the income tax to 3 percent for earnings above six hundred dollars and 5 percent on the rare income above ten thousand dollars.3
Even less fond of taxation than Northerners, Confederates waited until 1862 to impose an income tax of 5 percent. By 1864 the levy was up to 10 percent. With much of its wealth in slaves and land, and a large portion of its population under occupation, the Confederacy had little to collect and no way to collect it. In the end the South financed most the war on the less invasive but highly speculative printing and borrowing of money.4
After the war, the U.S. government suspended the income tax for years but never closed the department created to enforce it. Ever since the Civil War, Americans have lived with the Internal Revenue Service.
2. First Paper Currency as Legal Tender (February 25, 1862)
By Christmas 1861 the U.S. government was nearly bankrupt. Creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of economic collapse, citizens hoarded gold and silver. Tax revenues were not due for months. Daily federal expenditures reached millions of dollars. Lincoln lamented, “The bottom is out of the tub.”5
To alleviate the immediate problem, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase demanded the issue of a paper currency. Paper money existed, from state and city banks, even shops and railroads. The system worked because most transactions were local, but Americans from all regions historically distrusted federal control over money. The U.S. Constitution permitted the minting of coins, but it mentioned nothing of paper. For the Federal government to print money was unconstitutional, or at least an abuse of power, some argued.6
Legal implications aside, lawmakers feared the public would reject a national scrip. As non-interest-bearing and unbacked by gold or silver, U.S. notes could become as worthless as the paper on which they were printed. Chase assured this money would be different.
Unlike existing paper money, or the notes the Confederate government, states, cities, and business were printing, the U.S. currency would be legal tender. With a few exceptions, citizens, businesses, and the government itself had to accept the money “for all debts public and private.” Practicality won over suspicion, and Congress passed the Legal Tender Act of 1862. The U.S. Treasury issued $150 million in notes.7
The Confederate money guaranteed nothing, except to be redeemable in silver two years after the successful conclusion of the war. In four years, the U.S. government issued $450 million in notes; which retained most of its value. The Confederacy printed $1.5 billion in notes, counterfeiters added millions more, all of which became little more than souvenirs with the fall of Richmond.8
Printed green on one side, U.S. national currency was nicknamed “greenbacks.” Printed with low-quality ink that faded after brief use, Confederate money was sometimes called “graybacks,” but the term was more often a pseudonym for lice.
3. First Battle Between Ironclads (March 9, 1862)
Neither the Monitor nor the Merrimack (rechristened the CSS Virginia) was the first iron-armored warship. France created the first seagoing ironclad in 1859, with Britain building two in 1860. Ironclad ships, however, had never faced one another in battle—until the Civil War.9
Intended to break the Union blockade, the CSS Virginia was almost as long as a football field and sported ten guns, four inches of armor, and a crew of 320. In her hull were five massive coal-burning boilers, capable of giving the “floating barn roof” a top speed of just a few knots. Launched from Norfolk, Virginia, on March 8, 1862, the slow ship quickly proved its mettle in action.
The lumbering ironclad headed for U.S.-held Hampton Roads, where three sailing ships and two steam frigates, all amply armed, blocked the mouth of the James River. Unimpressed, the Virginia rammed one ship, blasted another, and chased another aground. More than 240 U.S. sailors died that day. The Virginia took ninety-eight direct hits but experienced no damage.10
Word of the Virginia’s success sent Lincoln’s cabinet into a panic. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton feared the indomitable ship would sail up the Potomac and shell the White House. It would be prudent, Stanton insisted, to evacuate the cities on the eastern seaboard.11
That same night, a recently finished Union ironclad was towed into Hampton Roads and moored next to the grounded Federal warship. More than 170 feet long, the “cheese box on a raft” floated level with the water, except for a turret sheathed in eight inches of layered iron and holding two cannon. Faster and more maneuverable than the Virginia, the USS Monitor was just as sturdy.
Next morning the two warships hammered each other in a four-hour battle. Solid shots (each weighing more than a person) clanged against cast iron and deflected in all directions. Virginia ran aground, then freed herself. Monitor took a direct hit to its pilothouse. Each ship tried to ram the other.
Eventually the battle ended in a draw. As both sides scrambled to make more armored ships, the days of sails and masts were clearly numbered.12
The Confederacy spent $173,000 to build the Virginia. The Union spent $1.5 million just to review ironclad contractors and designs.
4. First National Military Draft in American History (April 16, 1862)
The year 1862 did not start well for the Confederacy. February defeats at FORTS HENRY AND DONELSON cost thirteen thousand men and exposed Tennessee to conquest. Failure at PEA RIDGE surrendered half of Arkansas. NEW ORLEANS, Kentucky, and northwest Virginia were all but back in the Union. New volunteers were few. ROBERT E. LEE, newly appointed military adviser to President Davis, recommended drastic measures.
In March Davis went before the Confederate Congress and proposed conscription for all able-bodied men between eighteen and forty-five. Those selected would serve three years or until the end of the war. One-year volunteers, most of them close to the end of their term, had to serve two additional years.
Legislators were furious. Not only did this violate the sanctity of states’ rights over the central government, it also illustrated the failure of Richmond to manage the resources, patriotism, and lives pledged to it since Fort Sumter. Reluctantly, two-thirds of the Congress voted for the Conscription Act, mandating eligibility of men not older than thirty-five. Exempted from the draft were skilled workers deemed invaluable, such as telegraphers, mail carriers, and train engineers, plus all Confederate and state government officials—the very men who enacted the draft law.13
Draftees were allowed to hire substitutes, but this sparked accusations of “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.” The slogan’s intensity grew in the following draft, which exempted owners of twenty or more slaves.
The Union followed suit in March 1863. Sparking protests and riots, the draft netted only forty-six thousand of more than seven hundred thousand eligible. The rest paid a commutation fee of three hundred dollars, purchased substitutes, found exemption, or simply went into hiding. As with the Southern call-up, the Union draft coerced thousands to volunteer. The promise of bounties and choice of regiment was more appealing than being thrown into the mix and labeled a conscript.14
Among those in the Union who hired substitutes—future president Grover Cleveland, J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and Lincoln’s personal secretary John Nicolay. Lincoln himself hired a substitute—John Summerfield Staple—for five hundred dollars.
5. First Production of Machine-Stitched Shoes (1862)
An enduring myth suggests that, out of necessity, the South was more inventive than the North. Creative though it was in finding alternatives, such as saving horsehair for sutures, sorghum for sugar, and dried acorns for coffee, the Confederacy never matched the Union’s eruption of innovation. In four years the Confederate Patent Office granted 266 patents, whereas its Union counterpart granted more than 16,000.15
By mail and in person, the White House and War Department received a blizzard of conceptuals, prototypes, and blueprints. Some wavered between comical and tragic, such as exploding bullets, steam-powered flying machines, weather-predicting equipment, and chemical and biological weapons. A handful of others could not be ignored, including a pair of shoes brought to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton.16
There was nothing revolutionary about the footwear except for the way it was made. In 1858 inventor Lyman Blake patented a design for a specialized sewing machine. In 1862 Gordon McKay improved the design and began production with it. The machine stitched the soles of shoes to their uppers. Unexciting compared to the Gatling gun of the 1850s or the first use of chloroform in the 1840s, the invention was nonetheless a monumental achievement in that the process was previously done by hand.17
The McKay machine produced shoes cheaper, stronger, and one hundred times faster than before. Skilled shoemakers, in short supply during the war, were no longer required to fill huge army requisitions. Leased to subcontractors, McKay’s contraptions produced more than two million shoes in a year. All the while, thousands in the Confederate Army marched barefoot.18
In 1895 the United States produced 120 million pairs of shoes. More than half were made with McKay sewing machines.
6. First U.S. Medal of Honor (March 25, 1863)
Medals were not a standard part of the American military. Traditional thinking considered them undemocratic and unnecessary. Ideally, serving one’s country was to be rewarding enough. For Union soldiers, this service often meant months of morale-sapping tedium wintering in camp, patrolling occupied areas, and waiting in siege lines. Even less eventful was blockade duty. In guarding thirty-five hundred miles of coastline with hundreds of other ships, a crew could go for months without making contact with a bona fide blockade-runner.19
To bolster morale, Congress authorized the president in late 1861 to award Navy personnel a Medal of Honor in recognition of efficiency and gallantry in service. In the summer of 1862 the Army Medal of Honor was introduced (an air force version was added in 1956).
The first recipients were members of the April 1862 Andrews Raid (also known as the Great Locomotive Chase), a party of twenty-one Ohio soldiers led by Kentucky spy James J. Andrews. Stealing a train engine at Kennesaw, Georgia, north of Atlanta, the band hoped to sabotage tracks and bridges but were soon captured near the Tennessee border. Eight were eventually hanged, eight escaped, and six were exchanged. On March 25, 1863, Secretary of War Stanton awarded the medal to six of the survivors. Eventually, all received the medal save for the civilian Andrews, who was one of the eight who were hanged.20
In all, 2,625 soldiers and sailors received the medal during the war. A reexamination of all awards in 1917 resulted in more than 900 revocations, but no other war neared the number of recipients in the War Between the States. Next closest was the Second World War, with 433 decorations. Over time, conditions for its issue became increasingly stringent, and now most honorees receive the award posthumously.21
For the Confederacy, no equivalent existed. The most a soldier could receive was a promotion or a favorable review in an official report.22
The current navy Medal of Honor is almost identical to its original 1863 version, where the human figure of Discord cowers before Minerva (the Roman goddess of war), the two symbolizing the Confederacy and the Union respectively.
7. First Woman Surgeon in U.S. Military History (September 1863)
Before, during, and long after the war, a patriarchal American culture condemned the idea of women in the medical profession. Only a few medical schools accepted female students, and fewer communities allowed women doctors to practice.23
The military was no different. In 1861 medical practitioner and graduate of a Syracuse medical school Mary Edwards Walker applied for a surgeon’s commission in the Union army. Officials rejected her outright.24
Between hounding Washington officials for reconsideration, she volunteered as a nurse. She also provided assistance to families visiting loved ones in camp hospitals. Early in 1864 she finally received an appointment as an assistant surgeon in the Army of the Cumberland, the first woman surgeon ever commissioned by the U.S. military.25
Evidence suggests her appointment may have been more for her capacities as a spy than as a doctor. In 1864, while crossing enemy lines to care for civilians, she was taken prisoner and convicted of espionage. The recipient of considerable ridicule, she served four months in a Richmond prison. Her jailers, however, acknowledged her commission and exchanged her, along with other Union surgeons, for seventeen Confederate medical personnel.26
In 1865 Mary Edwards Walker received the Medal of Honor. A review board repealed the decoration in 1917 because she was technically a civilian. In 1977 the award was reinstated, and Walker remains to date the only female recipient of the award.
8. First Time a Submarine Ever Sank an Enemy Ship (February 17, 1864)
Diving contraptions existed long before the Civil War. A fully encased one-man vessel of ingenious design tried to sink a British ship during the American Revolution by attaching a bomb to its hull. Robert Fulton experimented with below-water vessels before he began his work on steamships. Nevertheless, a submarine had never sunk a ship in wartime.27
In a fit of optimism, both Union and Confederate governments contracted for submarines. Launched in 1862, the four-man USS Alligator proved too unwieldy and never saw combat. The two-man CSS Pioneer was scuttled in New Orleans to avoid capture. The following CSS American Diver was lost while being towed out into Mobile Bay. Then there was the H. L. Hunley.28
Built in an Alabama machine shop and brought to South Carolina by rail, the Hunley was forty feet long and barely four feet wide. Engineers equipped it with two hefty hatches, tiny portals, ballast tanks, rudders, fins, and a faulty air shaft. Two of its test runs ended in disaster, drowning twelve men and its inventor in the process. Ultimately, the Hunley proved deadlier to its crew than to the enemy.29
On the night of February 17, 1864, a crew of eight crawled inside the converted boiler, an engineering wonder bobbing in the cold waters of Charleston Harbor. Huddled to one side, sitting in candlelight, the men began to operate the drive-shaft crank, and the pilot steered the submarine into the open water. From its bow projected a twenty-foot iron pole holding a ninety-pound keg of black powder, destined for the USS Housatonic out in the harbor of Charleston.
The crew of the Housatonic knew to be on watch. The Hunley and most other “secret weapons” were hardly unknown to either side. When a lookout spotted a suspicious rippling in the harbor waters, Union fears were confirmed.
Just as the alarm bells rang out, the Hunley’s spar torpedo detonated. Fire, water, wood, and bodies flew skyward. The Housatonic rolled to port. Sailors scrambled for the mast riggings as the ship sank in shallow water.30
Damaged in the attack and equipped with primitive navigation equipment, the Hunley wandered seaward and sank, drowning all 8 hands. Only 5 of Housatonic’s 155 perished, yet the Hunley had done something never before accomplished. Not until 1914 would a submarine sink another ship.31
After the war, circus mogul P. T. Barnum offered one hundred thousand dollars for the recovery of the Hunley, but no one was able to claim the prize. Not until 136 years after it went down was the famous sub found and salvaged.
9. First Assassination of an American President (April 14, 1865)
Lincoln knew full well that head of state was not a safe occupation. In his lifetime, assassins tried to kill Queen Victoria and Andrew Jackson, and succeeded in killing two czars, an emperor of Mexico, a prime minister of England, and a king of Afghanistan. In 1862 alone, assassins murdered the presidents of Colombia and Honduras. After the fall of Richmond, Jefferson Davis seemed to be the next likely target, as thousands North and South blamed the Confederate president for the war and its consequences.
It was April 14, Good Friday, just days after ROBERT E. LEE had capitulated at Appomattox. A similar surrender was expected in North Carolina, where WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN had JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON cornered. Washington, D.C., was in a festive mood.
News spread that Lincoln would be attending Ford’s Theatre that night to see Our American Cousin, a mediocre comedy. Exhausted but feeling obligated to make an appearance, Lincoln went.
Assigned to guard the presidential box were a White House footman and a policeman, the typical arrangement. Except for public speeches and on travels, Lincoln rarely had anyone guarding him. Perhaps more guards would have been present had Lincoln’s original guests accepted his invitation, but U. S. Grant and his wife had cordially declined.
As the play progressed, the policeman wandered from his post, and the footman thought nothing of allowing a famous stage actor to call on the president. Moments later, the actor blasted a .44 caliber bullet through the president’s occipital lobe.
Lincoln lived nine more hours, unconscious. Carried to a boarding house across the street, he slowly hemorrhaged to death in front of his cabinet, doctors, and his wife. At 7:22 a.m., April 15, 1865, his heart stopped.32
Since then, attackers have launched at least eight direct assaults upon the lives of U.S. chief executives. These attacks proved fatal to Civil War veterans James A. Garfield (1881) and William McKinley (1901), and to World War II veteran John F. Kennedy (1963).
Lincoln had long frequented the playhouses of the capital. On one visit to Ford’s Theatre, he partook of a play titled The Marble Heart, starring John Wilkes Booth.
A single bullet reaped horrible consequences for the South after the war.
10. First Woman Executed by the U.S. Government (July 17, 1865)
Conspiracy theories erupted after the slaying of Lincoln. The implicated included the papacy, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, and the Confederate army. In flight from recently captured Richmond, Jefferson Davis was also a prime suspect. Yet there was no doubt about the hit man.
Several witnesses recognized the assassin immediately as he leapt from the president’s box. A star of Ford’s and many other theaters, John Wilkes Booth made no attempt to hide his face as he limped across the stage, brandished a dagger, and shouted, “Sic semper tyranis” (“Thus ever to tyrants,” the state motto of Virginia).
The murder investigation quickly led to Mary Surratt’s Washington boarding house, where Booth was a frequent visitor. After a few questions, police arrested the forty-two-year-old Surratt when she denied knowing Lewis Powell, alias Lewis Paine, a man who attempted to kill Secretary of State William Seward on the night of the assassination. Paine, along with several other members of Booth’s inner circle, was one of Surratt’s boarders.33
Surratt and seven men were tried in a military court. Evidence against her was speculative. Her son John was familiar with Booth. An associate of hers, John Lloyd, testified Mary spoke to him on the day of the shooting about acquiring some firearms. Otherwise, there was nothing to link her with the conspirators. A national desire for revenge, however, prompted the conviction of all eight defendants. Four were to be hanged, including Surratt.
Two days after sentencing, on a hot summer afternoon, Surratt, Powell, George Atzerodt (assigned to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson), and David Herold (who helped Booth escape from Washington) entered the courtyard of the Old Capitol Prison. Led to the gallows, their legs were bound. Hoods were placed over their heads. Powell begged for Surratt’s life, proclaiming her innocent. Just before the stroke of 2 p.m., the platform upon which they were standing swung away. Officials let them hang for half an hour.34
John H. Surratt, Mary’s son, fled the country and spent time in Rome. Nearly captured, he fled to Alexandria, Egypt, where he was eventually apprehended. Brought to trial in 1867, he was released for lack of evidence.
Images of charging horses, bursting cannon, and waving flags tend to inspire the imagination more easily than scenarios of financial balance sheets and cleverly worded legislation, but there is much discrepancy among historians as to the importance of battles in history. Traditionalists might condone the “Great Man Theory,” in which generals and presidents are the primary directors of fate, whereas social and economic historians often interpret battles as expressions rather than instigators of existing conditions.
Whatever the view, it is important to consider that in the case of the Civil War, large portions of the opposing sides opted for warfare to settle their differences. In turn, battles within the war played a noticeable role in determining political options, economic climate, and national morale. One Confederate soldier offered a poignant view of battles and their role: “If we don’t get at each other sometime, when will the war end?”35
Militarily speaking, cavalier strikes and spur-of-the-moment miracles did not decide the war as much as long, decimating campaigns. Within those campaigns, there were battles of considerable effect, some of which are represented below. Listed here, in chronological order, are the military engagements marking the greatest change in the nature of the war in terms of military, economic, and political consequences.
1. First Manassas (Virginia, July 21, 1861)
A close fight between green troops, First Manassas (First Bull Run) ended with a timely counterattack from the Confederates, who worked from the defensive for most of the action. Considering their inexperience, Union soldiers attacked much better than they withdrew. Rumor and roadblocks turned an otherwise orderly disengagement into a full-fledged panic, sending Confederate morale skyward.36
The popular view is to consider First Manassas a costly win for the South. Overconfidence from the victory, so the theory goes, actually lulled the Virginia theater, and the Confederacy as a whole, into a fatal complacency, while the North mobilized for a long fight. This is an odd interpretation in light of the results.
The Union did not launch another offensive toward Richmond for the rest of 1861 and several months into 1862. If the Washington area prepared for war, so did Virginia. Safe from harassment, the Confederacy’s most populous and industrialized state organized defenses and gathered munitions. The “overconfidence” of Manassas would serve the Virginia theater well, acting as the base for future victories at the SEVEN DAYS’ BATTLES (June–July 1862), SECOND MANASSAS (August 1862), the Shenandoah Valley (March–September 1862), FREDERICKSBURG (December 1862) and CHANCELLORSVILLE (May 1863).
A late arrival to the battle, one of the many famous onlookers to First Manassas was Confederate president Jefferson Davis, who briefly considered leading a group of stragglers into combat.
2. Forts Henry and Donelson (Tennessee, February 6, February 12–16, 1862)
It is easy to dismiss rivers when looking at a map. The twenty-first-century traveler rarely thinks of waterways, as they are made almost irrelevant by concrete roads and steel bridges. To a military tactician in the nineteenth century, however, the cartographer’s blue lines were formidable obstacles and potential death traps. Rivers were also highways on which an army could move deep into its opponent’s territory.
There are only three major rivers leading from the North into what was the Confederacy: the Mississippi, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee. Stemming from the Ohio River, the latter two enter northwest Tennessee a dozen miles apart. Guarding the Tennessee was Fort Henry, and holding the Cumberland was Fort Donelson.
In ten days, ULYSSES S. GRANT led a combined land and water assault upon the forts and delivered the Union its greatest victories of the war to that point. Of the two battles, Fort Donelson is by far the more famous. Maintained today as a national battlefield park, it was the larger and latter of the two contests and the site of a costly Confederate blunder. Winning the Cumberland provided a water route along the Kentucky-Tennessee border, which the Union used to take the vital rail link of Nashville.
Arguably, the Union triumph at Fort Henry was more significant. The Tennessee River cuts through the western third of its namesake, skirts the northwest corner of Mississippi, runs across north Alabama, approaches Georgia, then reenters the southeast edge of Tennessee. The Union used this river run to secure major victories at SHILOH (April 1862), Iuka (September 1862), Corinth (October 1862), and CHATTANOOGA (November 1863).
Refusing terms of capitulation to his captives at Fort Donelson, U. S. Grant received the nickname “Unconditional Surrender” Grant.
Union victories at Forts Henry and Donelson were the first good news for the North and signaled the presence of Ulysses S. Grant.
3. New Orleans (Louisiana, April 23–25, 1862)
It was by far the largest city in the South, holding more people in 1861 than Atlanta, Charleston, Montgomery, Nashville, and Richmond put together. The linchpin between the Father of Waters and the Seven Seas, New Orleans trafficked more commerce than all other Southern ports combined. The Confederacy could not give it up, let alone give it away.37
Yet several factors doomed the Crescent City. In early 1862 a Union advance toward the railroad hub of Corinth, Mississippi, forced Confederate troops out of Louisiana and into the bloodbath of SHILOH. Left holding New Orleans proper were three thousand militia, supported downriver by several small ships, one functioning ironclad, and two masonry forts—all of which was little challenge to a Union fleet of forty-three gunboats and a land force of fifteen thousand. On April 24, 1862, after shelling the two river bastions into rubble, Union Rear Adm. David G. Farragut ran his ships upriver and captured New Orleans the next day, with Gen. BENJAMIN F. BUTLER’S army close behind.
The fall of New Orleans was a crushing blow to the South, the rough equivalent to the Union losing New York City. The fact that New Orleans fell after minimal fighting made the news particularly bitter to loyal Confederates.38
In short order, the Union captured a metropolis of 180,000, gained inroads to the Confederate interior, seized the lower part of the Mississippi, and added a premium port to its blockade operations. For all of this, the Union lost 36 men killed and 135 wounded.39
The Union hero of New Orleans, Rear Adm. David Glasgow Farragut, was born in Tennessee and married a Virginian. His mother, who died when he was a child, was interred in New Orleans.
4. The Seven Days’ Battles (Virginia, June 25– July 1, 1862)
Despite the overwhelming caution of Union commander GEORGE B. MCCLELLAN during his Peninsula campaign, the Army of the Potomac had drawn within sight of the Confederate capital. HARPER’S WEEKLY predicted Richmond would fall in days if not hours. The combined armies numbered a fifth of a million men, but the Union held a two-to-one advantage.
Replacing a recently wounded JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON at the head the Confederate defenses, the heretofore unimpressive ROBERT E. LEE chose to attack. In six different battles within a week, Lee drove the Union forces back. Performing far better than their cautious leader, the Federals won most of the battles and induced twice as many casualties as they received. Consequently, many in blue were shocked to hear the command to retreat day after day.40
Overall, the Seven Days was wrought with paradox. Clearly it was a Union defeat. McClellan abandoned the offensive, plus tons of equipment—including thirty-one thousand rifles—citing he was facing overwhelming numbers. Yet Lee viewed the campaign as a defeat as well, because he hoped to bag the entire Union force. The Union won four of six battles outright, yet retreated six times. The Confederates drove the Federals back nearly thirty miles and away from Richmond, yet suffered twice as many deaths.
However, three great changes occurred. McClellan, once the darling of the Union cause, plummeted in stature. Many Northerners were so incensed by his pathetic performance that they wanted him charged with treason. In contrast, the campaign signaled the grand ascension of Lee, who beforehand had been relegated to managing coastal defenses after failing to hold northwest Virginia in 1861. For Lee’s defense of Richmond, his fellow Confederates elevated him to mythical greatness. Lastly, the campaign was one of the war’s most lethal. Altogether, more than twenty-eight thousand men were killed or wounded. Taken collectively, the Seven Days’ battles cost more lives than any other battle with the exception of GETTYSBURG.41
To hasten his army’s retreat after the Seven Days, Union commander George B. McClellan contemplated leaving all of its supplies, weapons, and ammunition behind.
5. Antietam (Maryland, September 17, 1862)
After hearing of ROBERT E. LEE’S impressive victory at SECOND MANASSAS, British foreign secretary John Russell wrote to Prime Minister Lord Palmerston: “The time is come for offering mediation to the United States Government, with a view to the recognition of the independence of the Confederates.” The date on the letter was September 17, 1862.42
Ten days later news reached London of another battle “to the northwest of Washington,” which had transpired the same day Russell had suggested a radical change in British policy. Details of the battle were not yet clear, but evidently the Union had prevailed, and Lee was falling back.
Militarily, the triumph was marginal. The Union victory near Sharpsburg broke a string of Confederate victories in the region. Loyal Northern newspapers initially called Antietam a smashing success, until they discovered that it cost of twelve thousand Union dead and wounded. The “victory,” however, allowed Lincoln to announce his pivotal EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION, bringing a new sense of purpose to his country and to the war.43
For the Confederates, the defeat was initially a terrible shock. Lee would not attempt another sortie for ten months. Jefferson Davis fell into despair, as did many citizens and soldiers of his country who assumed Lee’s successes would continue unabated. In eleven hours the South lost more than eleven thousand killed and wounded, a number larger than many Confederate cities. Though many did not yet realize it, defeat at Antietam also meant the end of British plans to intervene.44
At the time of the battle, there were around thirteen hundred residents of Sharpsburg, Maryland. After the battle, dead soldiers in the immediate area outnumbered them four to one.
The stalemate at Antietam allowed Lincoln to publish the Emancipation Proclamation. It also ended the command of George B. McClellan.
6. Chancellorsville (Virginia, May 1–4, 1863)
When hearing of the Union defeat near Chancellorsville, a Northern newspaper editor could hardly believe the news. “My God! It is horrible—horrible, and think of it, 130,000 magnificent soldiers so cut to pieces by less than 60,000.” Chancellorsville was one of the most unexpected, almost unimaginable achievements of the Confederate military.45
Facing a vastly larger army and about to be outflanked, Lee ignored nearly every military axiom and divided his forces three ways. With his left, he outflanked the flankers, then crushed them between his left and his center. When his right came under attack, he gathered his divided army and defeated that advance as well.
Much of the victory was due to the blundering hesitation of Union general Joseph Hooker and the brilliant leadership of the Confederate corps commanders, particularly THOMAS J. “STONEWALL” JACKSON. Regardless, Lee’s image was the chief beneficiary, as the stoic Virginian looked as unstoppable as ever. Summing up the emotions of many fellow Unionists, Republican Sen. Charles Sumner cried, “Lost, all is lost.”46
Yet the victory cost the life of Jackson and killed or maimed 22 percent of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Rather than GETTYSBURG, many now see Chancellorsville as the high tide of the Confederacy, soon to ebb from the overconfidence Lee displayed in Pennsylvania two months later.47
During the battle of Chancellorsville, at least one Union soldier was the victim of corrupt government contractors. He discovered his rifle cartridges were filled with dirt rather than gunpowder.
7. Gettysburg (Pennsylvania, July 1–3, 1863)
An abrupt fight with legendary tales of heroism, the largest and bloodiest battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere, Gettysburg captures the imagination unlike any other Civil War battle, especially when compared to the slow, extenuated grinds of the blockade, the siege of Vicksburg, or the siege of Petersburg.
Because of its size, northern location, and dramatic turns of battle, Gettysburg also invites a deluge of what-if scenarios or counterfactual history. Against countless variables, any hypotheses on different outcomes and effects are basically guesswork.48
What the battle did provide was a major surge in Union morale. Many soldiers in the Army of the Potomac felt as if the recent defeats at FREDERICKSBURG and CHANCELLORSVILLE were avenged. The army expelled Lee from the North as it had done at ANTIETAM.
Yet the Union president was less than pleased. George Gordon Meade failed to pursue his beaten opponent, allowing the Confederates to cross back into Virginia unopposed. “This is a dreadful reminiscence of McClellan,” vented Lincoln, fuming over what he viewed as a lost chance to capture the Army of Northern Virginia in total. In a scathing rebuke to Meade, he wrote: “Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it.” To admonish a victorious general, however, would be to undermine the victory itself. Lincoln never sent the message.49
On the Confederate side, sympathetic journalists referred to Gettysburg as a “brief setback” if not a victory. It was in fact the deadliest battle of the war for the South. Nearly a third of the Confederacy’s largest army was gone. Desertions accelerated rapidly. Lee remained on the defensive for the rest of 1863 and never invaded the North again. Yet the loss was not total. His army would live to fight another day—another 645 days, to be precise.50
Victor of the largest battle ever fought in the United States, Union commander George Gordon Meade had been born in Spain.
Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg proved unsuccessful in routing the Union army. As a result, Lee retreated to Virginia and never again came north. In terms of the battle itself, many have emphasized it was lost by Lee rather than won by Meade.
8. The Surrender of Vicksburg (Mississippi, July 4, 1863)
On the afternoon of July 7, while working through his frustration over the limited victory at GETTYSBURG, Lincoln received a visit from a visibly ecstatic Gideon Welles. With telegram in hand, the navy secretary informed the president that Vicksburg had fallen to U. S. Grant and W. T. Sherman. Embracing the messenger and the good news, Lincoln beamed, “I cannot in words tell you of my joy over this result! It is great, Mr. Welles! It is great!”51
For months, the Union army had tried charging, digging, flanking, and shelling its way into the Mississippi town. After Grant’s army surrounded the city and laid siege for forty-seven days, the Confederate stronghold capitulated on the Fourth of July. As specifics came in, Lincoln had even more reason to celebrate. Grant had taken 31,600 prisoners and more than 170 cannon, six times Meade’s catch at GETTYSBURG. Nearby Port Hudson fell soon after, contributing 5,000 more prisoners and giving the Union control over the length of the Mississippi.52
Paris and London heard the results of GETTYSBURG a few days before learning of Vicksburg, but it was the news of the latter that sent Confederate credit on a dive. Domestically, inflation in the South accelerated, as did its military desertions.
Losing the mighty river, the Confederacy also lost connection to Arkansas, much of Louisiana, and Texas, which held more cattle and horses than any other state. For the Union, the dollar surged in strength, and the growing Midwest could once again trade with the world. The end of the Vicksburg campaign also freed up men and materiel for operations eastward, namely in Virginia and Georgia, where Grant and Sherman would launch their final grand offensives of the war.53
The Confederate commander at Vicksburg was John Clifford Pemberton, a native of Pennsylvania.
The fall of Vicksburg gave the Union complete control of the Mississippi River and split the Confederacy in half.
9. The Wilderness (Virginia, May 5–6, 1864)
The names of Grant and Lee are frequently mentioned in the same breath, but the two generals faced each other for less than a quarter of the war. Their reintroduction (they had met briefly during the Mexican War) occurred in the thickets south of the Rappahannock River, in an area aptly named the Wilderness. The fighting was near Chancellorsville, where Lee had achieved his greatest victory a year earlier.
For two days, in close and brutal fighting, 101,000 Federals and 61,000 Confederates slashed into each other. Lee had once again stemmed a Union advance, registering over 14,000 killed and wounded while losing 7,750 of his own.54
The Union had lost in Virginia again, but rather than retreat northward and recover, Grant moved south, determined to continue the engagement until he outflanked or broke through the Confederate line. The Wilderness is most significant because it signaled the beginning of almost continual engagement that would finally terminate the stalemate in the East.
Although Grant’s plan would take eleven months to work, the immediate effect of the advance upon his troops was remarkable. Suffering yet another loss under yet another general, and losing more than twice the casualties as their opponent, the Federals were nonetheless heartened to be moving forward. One Union soldier commented, “We began to sing…We were happy.” 55
In the battle of the Wilderness, Confederate Gen. James Longstreet was wounded by gunfire from his own troops. Stonewall Jackson had been wounded by his own troops at Chancellorsville, a little over a year before and a little over a mile away.
10. Jonesboro (Georgia, August 25–September 1, 1864)
In August 1864 time was running out for the Lincoln government. Grant’s once aggressive Wilderness campaign had stalled on the outskirts of Petersburg, and all he had to show for his efforts were fifty thousand casualties. In August, Lincoln warned his cabinet by way of memorandum: “It seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be re-elected.” Days later, the Democratic Party gathered for its national convention in Chicago, and declared the war a failure, a message heartily received by a growing peace movement in the North.56
WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN and his three armies offered no encouragement. Since May they had marched toward Atlanta from Chattanooga. On the way they lost twenty-five thousand casualties, including the life of promising Gen. James B. McPherson at the head of the Army of the Tennessee. Although under siege, Atlanta perservered.57
Then on August 25 Sherman instructed his forces to leave their trenches to the west of the city and head south. Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood declared victory, believing Sherman was retreating. Sherman instead headed to Jonesboro to cut the rail lines supplying Atlanta. After several days of denial, Hood eventually realized he was about to be trapped. In response, he set fire to his supply depots, and retreated. On September 1 Union forces moved into the city unopposed.58
At the time Atlanta was known as the “Gate City.” It lived up to its nickname for the Union. Its surrender opened the way for Sherman’s March to the Sea and a swath of devastation through Georgia and the Carolinas. More important, the fall of Atlanta was a clear indication that the war would soon end in favor of the Union. In the November elections, voters concurred. Lincoln, who was surprised to have been re-nominated by party back in June, retained the presidency by a wide margin.59
Real estate development has all but eradicated the battlefield of Jonesboro.
Schools, streets, and newborns continue to be named after beloved commanders of the Brothers’ War. Conversely, some generals are still vilified. Ranking the 1,008 generals of the Civil War depends on one’s criteria. For soldier morale, JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON may stand highest. In ferocity, few can top Nathan Bedford Forrest. GEORGE B. MCCLELLAN is among the very finest in terms of supply and organization.
The following are the best commanding generals based on their respective success in managing the primary variables of military operations, including tactics, logistics, communications, and overall strategy. Most important, they are measured for the magnitude of their contribution to the success of their side.60
1. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson (C.S., Virginia, 1824–63)
He was never wasteful with his soldiers yet pushed them farther and faster than any other commander. He won on the offensive and defensive, led forces small and large with equal precision, and used terrain and timing to defeat his opponents. With limited means, he played a major role in nearly every Confederate victory in the eastern theater. Perhaps his early departure spared him from eventual defamation, but while alive, Thomas J. Jackson had no equal on either side.
Eccentric, superstitious, and overtly pious, Jackson differed little from many other Americans of the period, but in the military, he was a complete misfit. He was aloof, humorless, awkward, and was often the target of ridicule from his unimpressed pupils at the Virginia Military Institute. Then the war started.61
To his troops he was best known as “Old Jack” or “Old Blue Light,” the latter nickname coming from the way his sky blue eyes glared in the midst of battle. He earned the title “Stonewall” while standing his ground against harsh opposition at FIRST MANASSAS. Yet it was his 1862 Shenandoah Valley campaign that catapulted him into legend. From March to June 1862, with forces ranging from four thousand to seventeen thousand, far from rail and reserve support, vastly outnumbered, Jackson accomplished a military feat that remains a subject of international study. In three months he drove off three armies and held a fourth to the outskirts of Washington. His men captured thousands of men and millions of dollars in weapons and supplies, marched and countermarched hundreds of miles, and secured the upper Confederacy’s primary source of grain and cattle for the remainder of the year.62
A harsh disciplinarian, but not without purpose, Jackson was quick to punish and even execute the disobedient. The rest he pushed to the limit. Before the battle of SECOND MANASSAS, Jackson marched an entire corps of twenty-four thousand to a Federal depot at Manassas Junction, consumed or destroyed the entire cache and disappeared, covering fifty miles in two days. Figuratively and literally, Jackson created a lean fighting force, a “foot cavalry” unburdened by excess baggage, spoils, or the sickly. Few of his soldiers were fond of their taskmaster, but they were proud of the wins they habitually achieved.63
ROBERT E. LEE prized Jackson, for it was Stonewall’s men who held the field at Second Manassas, allowing Lee to move up reinforcements and win the day. In September 1862 outside Sharpsburg, Maryland, a vastly outnumbered Lee found his back to the Potomac and sixty thousand bluecoats advancing on his position. To Lee’s assistance came Jackson, marching up from his recent conquest of Harpers Ferry with two divisions, arguably sparing the great general from annihilation along the banks of the ANTIETAM. While Lee jabbed at Joseph Hooker outside CHANCELLORSVILLE, Jackson delivered a crushing left hook, marching twenty-four thousand men undetected past the Army of the Potomac then slamming into its right flank. It was a pivotal achievement and his last.
Riding reconnaissance that night, Jackson was accidentally shot by his own men. Languishing on his deathbed, he received a letter from the grateful Lee: “I should have chosen for the good of the country to be disabled in your stead.”64
Early in the war, Thomas J. Jackson thought one of his officers would do well leading mounted troops, so he reassigned Jeb Stuart from the infantry to the cavalry.
2. William Tecumseh Sherman (U.S., Ohio, 1820–91)
He had lived in the South for a dozen years, owned slave servants, and detested the rise of agitating abolitionists. As a result, William Tecumseh Sherman understood the Confederacy better than most any other general in blue.65
Approachable, unceremonious, intense, and highly intelligent, Sherman led his brigade ably at FIRST MANASSAS, one of the few Union officers to do so. Yet he fell into a depression soon after, frustrated by the escalation of the war and the carnage that he was certain would come.
Transferred unwillingly to Kentucky, Sherman told the War Department it would take at least two hundred thousand troops to launch an offensive from the Bluegrass State. Word of his request leaked out, and several newspapers judged him insane. Sherman’s estimations for success were not far off, but he was acting paranoid, claiming that much of Kentucky’s civilian population were Confederate spies.66
Subsequently transferred, Sherman regained himself and his reputation after a solid performance as a division commander at SHILOH, receiving accolades from his immediate superior, ULYSSES S. GRANT. Thereafter, the two men were fast and loyal allies.
In many ways, Sherman was the antithesis of Grant. Better with organization and supply, excitable, racist, and frequently inflexible, Sherman was also a superior strategist. Grant smashed into armies; Sherman outmaneuvered them (with the exception of Kennesaw Mountain, where he lost 2,000 to the Confederates’ 270). Although he lost several battles, he knew how to win campaigns. In 1863 he helped secure the Federal rear at VICKSBURG, assisted in lifting the Confederate siege of Union troops at CHATTANOOGA, and repeated the feat immediately at Knoxville. The next year, Sherman conquered Atlanta, largely by maneuver.67
The campaign for which he is most famous (and infamous) is his late 1864 March to the Sea. Often criticized as a harbinger of “total war” that included civilians, Sherman’s strategy differed little from ROBERT E. LEE’S 1863 campaign into Pennsylvania. Lee intended to take Harrisburg, and fortune willing, the city of Philadelphia; an original version of a march to the sea. Sherman succeeded where Lee failed. And in destroying property, Sherman broke the will of the opposition without forcing the body counts of a COLD HARBOR, a CHANCELLORSVILLE, or for that matter, a GETTYSBURG.68
Before the war, Sherman was superintendent of a school that later became Louisiana State University.
3. Robert E. Lee (C.S., Virginia, 1807–70)
Feverish admirers hail ROBERT E. LEE as the patron saint of the Lost Cause, a knightly figure who rallied mortal disciples against heartless modernism. Critics accurately note that he lost a third of his men and half of his battles. Regardless of one’s position, there are general truths that endure scrutiny. Lee’s premier weapons were his corps commanders, an unsurpassed ability to anticipate his opponents’ actions, and a willingness to depart from traditional tactics. His unflinching commitment, exemplary conduct, and personal bravery in the line of fire inspired his men, his people, and his president. With inferior materiel, scant food, and dwindling ranks, “Marse Robert” repeatedly fought off the largest and best-equipped army on earth.69
It is safe to say he was not afraid to use his soldiers. To push back the Federal army from the gates of Richmond in 1862, Lee used up fifty thousand men in four months. For his brilliant 1863 win at CHANCELLORSVILLE, he lost thirteen thousand in three days. The 1864 WILDERNESS campaign halted yet another Federal invasion but cost Lee sixty thousand casualties. He was effective but expensive.
The best and the worst that can be said of Lee is that he fought for Virginia first and last. While his departure from the U.S. armed forces after a quarter-century of service is well known, many observers fail to appreciate something less obvious but just as authentic. Lee was not particularly loyal to the Confederacy either.
In 1862 Lee bolstered Richmond’s defenses with troops he removed from South Carolina and Georgia. When Jefferson Davis asked him to send reinforcements to besieged Vicksburg in 1863, he instead launched an offensive into Pennsylvania to relieve pressure on Virginia. His president once asked him where the next line of defense should be if Richmond were lost. He responded that there would be no other line.70
Yet in his fixation, Lee indirectly provided the Confederacy a great service. In protecting his home, he also protected the Confederacy’s most populous state (for both slave and free populations), its largest source of capital wealth and weapons, and a major source of its draft animals and grain. His presence forced the Union to commit a disproportionate amount of men and supplies for the protection of Washington, resources that otherwise would have been free to move upon other states. In defrocking one-time heroes like McClellan and “Fighting Joe” Hooker, outwitting John Pope and AMBROSE E. BURNSIDE, and keeping George G. Meade and U. S. GRANT at bay for nearly two years, the devout Virginian gave the South more hope and the North more despair than any other figure in the war.71
Lee’s record in major engagements: eleven wins, twelve losses.
4. Ulysses S. Grant (U.S., Ohio, 1822–85)
He was not particularly intelligent or inventive. Costly frontal assaults at VICKSBURG, THE WILDERNESS, and COLD HARBOR demonstrated an inability to learn from previous failures. He let his men die on the field or in prisons before negotiating with the enemy. Yet this unassuming man from Galena, Illinois, proved to be the only Federal commander willing to use the strongest weapon available to the Union: attrition. Arguably, he was also the only general on either side to orchestrate a truly unified war effort.72
Defeat itself did not stop him. It stopped his fellow commanders often enough: John C. Frémont, Don Carlos Buell, Franz Sigel, and Nathaniel Banks in the West, Irvin McDowell, George B. McClellan, John Pope, AMBROSE E. BURNSIDE, Joseph Hooker, and George G. Meade in the East. Through perseverance, Grant eventually triumphed in both theaters.
His unique trait of calm focus in the face of destruction was apparent in the Tennessee battles of FORT DONELSON and SHILOH. Both times, the Confederates opened offensives upon his lines. Both times, his men were not prepared. Both times, Grant himself was miles away, anticipating no imminent action. Yet both times he rode to the front and personally rallied his beaten troops, using a composed, calculating demeanor to reassure and reassess, turning defeats into hard-fought victories.73
His two great prizes, Vicksburg and Richmond, exemplified his effective use of abrasion. At first there were the preliminary rounds of reconnaissance and maneuver, followed by an exchange of fierce blows with tremendous loss of blood and no conclusive results. Rather than accept defeat in either affair, Grant resorted to strangulation by siege, letting time and superior numbers work in his favor.
After his appointment to general in chief of the Union armies in March 1864, Grant again accomplished something his predecessors and adversaries could not. He coordinated simultaneous assaults upon multiple theaters, eliminating the opposition’s ability to concentrate its defenses. Grand attacks began in Louisiana, the Virginia coast, the Shenandoah Valley, northern Virginia, and Georgia. The latter three would propel Philip H. Sheridan, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Grant himself into international fame and wither the South into capitulation in a little over a year.
When Grant lost, he usually lost to ROBERT E. LEE, to whom he could credit nine of his eleven major combat defeats.
5. James Longstreet (C.S., South Carolina, 1821–1904)
Fighting from FIRST MANASSAS to Appomattox, commander of the First Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia, careful, stalwart, dependable Longstreet innately comprehended the precious limit of Southern numbers perhaps better than any Confederate general. His tool of choice was the counterattack, launching assaults only after weakening an opponent from the protection of a defensive stand.74
Blue-eyed, fair-skinned “Old Pete” was a man of clear kindness and few words. Good to his troops, his impressive height and sturdy build added to his image of a stolid and steady officer, an image that lasted through twenty-four years of military service: twenty for the United States and four with the Confederacy. A veteran of the SEVEN DAYS, ANTIETAM, GETTYSBURG, and THE WILDERNESS, Longstreet’s finest hours included his near-perfect infantry and artillery stand at MARYE’S HEIGHTS, his devastating counterattack against John Pope’s massive army at Second Manassas, and his assault through the Federal lines at CHICKAMAUGA.75
Lee frequently consulted him for advice, gave him premier assignments in several battles, and referred to him endearingly as “my old war horse.” Longstreet routinely performed orders with cohesive operation yet remained flexible and opportunistic once battles were in motion. Although not tremendously successful in independent command, Longstreet at the head of a corps proved to be the equal of Jackson.76
Longstreet’s granite reputation eventually crumbled, although it happened after the war. In the late 1860s he joined the Republican Party and spoke of conciliation with the victors. Consequently, several prominent Confederate colleagues reassessed his war record and openly questioned his loyalty as a Southerner. They recalled his failed 1864 siege of Knoxville, Tennessee, where he sent hundreds of men to their deaths in the deep moats of Fort Sanders, and they pointed to his apparent lethargy with troop deployment on GETTYSBURG’S second and third days.77
In response, Longstreet suggested the fault belonged to others, including his recently deceased mentor, ROBERT E. LEE. For this, Longstreet effectively erased his successes from Confederate lore.78
In 1848 Longstreet (fourth cousin to the bride) was best man at the wedding of Julia Dent and Ulysses S. Grant.
6. James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart (C.S., Virginia, 1833–64)
Critics and admirers alike label him cavalier, immature, cocky, reckless. Many dilute his achievements as acts of foolish youth, made possible by blind luck and an initially inferior enemy. Jeb Stuart indeed pushed luck and limits, but his methods were far from haphazard. He worked tirelessly to create and maintain an orderly and industrious staff, removed officers he deemed ineffective, was skilled in governing artillery, infantry, as well as cavalry, and led forces from two hundred to twenty thousand to victory.79
Perhaps Stuart’s greatest contributions happened before the great battles: gathering priceless information at minimal cost. Before attacking McClellan during the 1862 Peninsula campaign, Lee asked Stuart to run reconnaissance. To oblige, Stuart and his troops rode completely around McClellan’s army, destroyed supplies, and captured soldiers. More important, he revealed just how cautious and stagnant the Army of the Potomac had become. The cost of this productive romp? Stuart lost only one of his one thousand men.80
The man called “Beauty” provided an encore before the battle of SECOND MANASSAS. Riding behind enemy lines, Stuart and fifteen hundred men destroyed supply wagons and took three hundred prisoners. They even captured Union commander John Pope’s dress coat, personal baggage, and tens of thousands of dollars in gold and greenbacks. The greatest prize was Pope’s own dispatch ledger, containing information on the Union army’s strength and disposition.81
After ANTIETAM, Stuart again circled McClellan and one hundred thousand soldiers. Stuart’s party of eighteen hundred left McClellan stunned, albeit thirty hostages and twelve hundred horses lighter. Just two of Stuart’s troops were missing after a raid of 125 miles.82
Hailed as a cavalry genius, the former infantry officer accomplished some of his most valuable work as a director of artillery and footmen. At FREDERICKSBURG, a Federal attack swept forward against THOMAS J. “STONEWALL” JACKSON and the Confederate right flank. Stuart repulsed the advance by unleashing his horse artillery upon the Union’s left flank. At CHANCELLORSVILLE, Stuart took over the Second Corps of the wounded Jackson, using infantry and artillery to force Hooker into full retreat.83
There are two incidents where Stuart is heavily (and to a degree justly) criticized. In June 1863 near Brandy Station, Virginia, Stuart staged a mock cavalry battle for admiring citizenry. Days later a real battle fell upon him. More than ten thousand mounted bluecoats swarmed down upon Stuart’s position. After attacks and counterattacks, with blasting pistols and swinging sabers, the Confederates held the field. Stuart declared it a great victory, where in reality he allowed the enemy deep within his territory and lost forever the image of cavalry superiority. Weeks later, during the Gettysburg campaign, Stuart set off on another encircling raid. He captured or destroyed supplies and wagons, but he also left Lee blind and deaf to the whereabouts of a fast-moving Army of the Potomac. Some historians blame Lee for giving Stuart vague orders. Others criticize Stuart for leaving Lee for an extended period while behind enemy lines.84
In 1864, while the Army of Northern Virginia was fighting for survival at SPOTSYLVANIA, Stuart intercepted Union cavalry a dozen miles from Richmond. As Stuart directed his men on the front lines, a retreating Federal put a bullet in his abdomen. The following day Stuart was dead at age thirty-one of peritonitis. Upon hearing the news, Lee wept repeatedly.
Reflective of his youthful chides, Jeb Stuart nicknamed fellow officer William Hullihen “Honeybun.”
7. George H. Thomas (U.S., Virginia, 1816–70)
The pinnacle of professionalism, George H. Thomas was unshakable, calculating, reserved, loyal to his men and his superiors, and probably the best defensive general on either side. He tolerated nothing but the most professional behavior from himself and others and habitually worked near the front lines. Thrice his troops saved the Union from devastating losses and twice nearly obliterated the Army of Tennessee. Yet, for being Virginia-born and hesitant to attack, he was also a target of suspicion from many in the Union, including ULYSSES S. GRANT.85
A veteran of the Seminole Wars and the Mexican War, a West Point instructor in cavalry and artillery, at six feet tall and two hundred pounds, Thomas had the look and reputation of stability. This stability was put to the test at the battle of STONES RIVER, where he was one of three corps commanders under William S. Rosecrans. On the first day Confederates forced portions of the Union line three miles backward. Federal casualties exceeded ten thousand. Union corps and divisions overlapped and melted, but Thomas exuded a calm tenacity, kept soldiers supplied with ammunition, and directed a unified withdrawal to safer ground. That night Rosecrans convened a council of his officers, and several advised withdrawal. Thomas interjected and insisted: “This army does not retreat.” The Army of the Cumberland remained, and two days later were victorious.86
Thomas repeated his performance on a much larger scale at the 1863 battle of CHICKAMAUGA, when three Confederate divisions came pouring through a breach in the Federal line. A third of the Union army broke and ran, including its commander, Rosecrans. Thomas, second in command, remained steadfast and managed to keep a majority of the Army of the Cumberland on the field. By Confederate Gen. JAMES LONGSTREET’S count, there were twenty-five assaults upon the Union gap, but the Federals reformed and retreated yet did not break. What started as a rout became a withdrawal of cohesion. Known before as Old Tom, Slow Trot, and Pap, Thomas became nationally renowned as the Rock of Chickamauga. Lincoln said of Thomas’s performance, “It is doubtful whether his heroism and skill…has ever been surpassed in the world.”87
Thomas’s finest moment came days before he was about to be removed from command. After the 1864 battle of FRANKLIN, where JOHN BELL HOOD’S Army of Tennessee suffered horrid losses by attacking Union trenches, Hood moved toward the Tennessee capital, where Thomas and sixty thousand Federals were stationed. Hood dug in and waited, hoping Thomas would attack him.
Grant hounded Thomas to strike the weakened Confederates. Telegraph after telegraph threatened Thomas with dismissal if he did not move. The Rock apologized but informed Grant that a lack of horses and two successive ice storms jeopardized any assault. Days turned into weeks, and Grant feared Thomas had become another McClellan.88
When the sun came out in mid-December, the Virginian proved he was no Virginia Creeper. Just as Grant planned to go westward to relieve him personally, Thomas sent forth fifty-five thousand men, jabbing Hood’s right flank then smashing into his left. In two days, with a supremely organized offensive, Thomas inflicted more than six thousand casualties (twice as many as he received) and pushed Hood out of Tennessee. The once great Confederate army of the west had fought its last major battle.89
In 1831 Nat Turner’s Rebellion ravaged Southampton County, Virginia. The largest slave revolt in U.S. history killed more than sixty whites in two days. Some of the residents managed to escape in time, including fifteen-year-old George H. Thomas.
8. Philip H. Sheridan (U.S., New York, 1831–88)
At five foot five inches and 115 pounds, with stout legs, tight black hair, and eyes set in a permanent scowl, the West Pointer had the physique and look of kinetic intensity. Shy as a youngster, he grew into a nervous, judgmental, sometimes vicious adult who rarely offered any measure of forgiveness. In milder terms, Sheridan was a shrewd perfectionist. He began the war as a quartermaster and commissary officer. Precise and efficient, he was also very much a soldier’s soldier. He worked relentlessly to provide enlisted men with the best weapons and rations available. A Sheridan trademark, he never shied away from a fight with fellow officers, even his superiors, if he thought they were neglecting their men.90
Achieving a field command in May 1862, Sheridan revealed a dichotomous nature. He became calm when people panicked, and furious when others were complacent. On the first day of STONES RIVER, Confederate attacks sent two Federal divisions flying rearward. Sheridan’s division resisted the onslaught. He lost all three of his brigade commanders and 40 percent of his men, the worst losses he would ever experience in the war. Yet his steady and belligerent withdrawal helped Union lines reform and eventually launch a successful counteroffensive.91
In contrast, his greatest victory and purest display of temper may have been at the October 1864 battle of Cedar Creek. Impressed by the proficient and ferocious Sheridan, Grant gave him command of the Army of the Potomac’s cavalry and the responsibility of conquering the Shenandoah. The young Sheridan set in motion a scorched-earth policy, killing or confiscating livestock, burning grain, destroying barns. He even struck at the farmsteads of pacifist Quakers and Dunkers, reasoning that anything left could potentially benefit the enemy. While Sheridan was returning from a conference in Washington, some eighteen thousand Confederates under Jubal Early attacked and routed Sheridan’s thirty thousand. Sheridan arrived on the field to see his men dejected and resigned. Exploding into fury, swearing at the top of his lungs, he rode through his troops and fashioned a spirited counterattack. In an afternoon Sheridan’s men recaptured all the ground they had lost and took most of Early’s artillery, wagons, ambulances, and ammunition.92
Up to that point the Shenandoah had been where Union military careers, and thousands of Federal troops, had gone to die. In 1862 NATHANIEL BANKS, JOHN C. FRÉMONT, and Irvin McDowell failed to take it. In early 1864 Franz Sigel and David Hunter also faltered. Then, after months of ruthless destruction and a moment that became known as Sheridan’s Ride, the Valley was effectively in Union hands for good.
Sheridan would go on to lead his horse soldiers in the pursuit and capture of the Army of Northern Virginia near Appomattox Court House.93
Among the Union officers who personally witnessed Sheridan’s Ride were future presidents Maj. William McKinley and Col. Rutherford B. Hayes.
9. Patrick Cleburne (C.S., Ireland, 1828–64)
Brave, beloved by his soldiers, and one of two men of foreign birth to rise to major general in the South, Patrick Cleburne remains a sentimental favorite among Civil War historians—and for good reason. He evolved from a complete incompetent to the most adept, farsighted, and fierce division leader of the Confederacy.94
As a youth in his native Ireland, the serious and reserved fellow showed little promise. Academics were not his strong point. He served briefly in the British army with no distinction. He then immigrated to the United States in 1849 and joined the Confederate army when his adopted Arkansas seceded.
Leading a brigade at SHILOH, Cleburne’s performance was deplorable. Starting with twenty-seven hundred men, he ordered a series of attacks that made no impact upon strong defenses. The second day he was down to eight hundred, and he again attempted a reckless charge. By battle’s end, all but fifty-eight of his men were captured, wounded, missing, or dead.95
Rather than blame his superiors, he reassessed everything he knew about warfare. Coordinating with his junior officers, he paid greater attention to organization and supply. Before battle, he used sharpshooters to probe and reduce enemy positions. If an attack was ordered, he advanced using the protection of terrain and concentrated his firepower rather than simply launch a massed charge.96
Cleburne’s revised methods brought success to BRAXTON BRAGG’S otherwise dismal 1862 campaign into Kentucky. In a fight for Richmond, Kentucky, Cleburne’s men captured hundreds of Federals. At Perryville, Cleburne again pushed into enemy lines with success, until Bragg ordered a retreat. As mule- and horse-drawn wagons struggled over the hilly escape route, Bragg ordered the wagons and twenty thousand rifles therein destroyed. Cleburne instead ordered teams of men to carry the load up the steep inclines. He and his men escaped with the cache intact.97
In the New Year’s fight at STONES RIVER, Cleburne’s division was the most successful in pushing back the Union line, only to be pulled back when attacks failed on other sections of the front. When Sherman’s blue wave swept Bragg from Chattanooga in late 1863, it was Cleburne and his division who held on, refusing to budge from the north edge of Missionary Ridge. To clear this last obstacle, the Federals concentrated their forces upon him, and still Cleburne’s outnumbered and outgunned men did not give way. Only when he learned of the demise of the rest of Bragg’s army did Cleburne order a withdrawal, and while doing so fought vicious rear-guard actions against Federals three times his numbers.98
Hating the pomp and elitism often accompanying his grade, Cleburne was an odd mixture of practicality and ice-cold bravery. During standoffs in battle, he would personally roam into no man’s land to retrieve discarded weapons. In hopes of securing British and French diplomatic recognition and to strengthen the depleted army, he was the first Confederate general to propose liberating and arming slaves. Dubbed the Stonewall of the West, he received a fine compliment from a man normally averse to showering praise; ROBERT E. LEE called him “a meteor shining from a clouded sky.”99
Able to succeed in spite of serving under the likes of Bragg and LEONIDAS POLK, the quiet but driven man from Ireland did not live to see the end of the war. Cleburne was one of six Confederate generals to die at the slaughterhouse of Franklin. He was within reach of the Union lines when he was shot through the chest.100
At the battle of Richmond, Kentucky, a minié ball hit Cleburne in the side of the face, smashed two teeth, and exited past his lips. In a rare show of humor, he later joshed that he caught the Union bullet in his mouth and spat it right back out.
10. Nathan Bedford Forrest (C.S., Tennessee, 1821–77)
With no military experience and six months of formal education, this Tennessee plantation owner fused a talent for leadership with a penchant for violence and rose from a private to lieutenant general. Arch-nemesis WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN called him “the most remarkable man our Civil War produced on either side.”
Nathan Bedford Forrest was almost forty years old when he joined the Seventh Tennessee. Standing six feet two inches tall, the driven and imposing Forrest became impatient with lesser men. To rectify the situation he raised and equipped a mounted battalion with his own money. The battalion fittingly elected him their commanding officer.101
Ineloquent, barely literate, his lack of education embarrassed and frustrated him, yet it may have been one of his greatest strengths. Understanding only the basics of military tactics, he in turn communicated them in their most basic terms. As a result, his men knew quickly and exactly what to do. Common phrases included, “Get there first with the most” (attain the high ground with superior forces), “Bulge ’em” (conduct feinting attacks), “hit ’em on the end” (attack the enemy flank), or “mix with ’em” (establish close quarters and eliminate artillery opportunity).
A battle near Guntown, Mississippi, exemplified his tenets on combat. Learning that eight thousand Federals (including three thousand cavalry and eighteen guns) were coming from Memphis to subdue him and his thirty-five hundred men, Forrest assessed the situation. The area near Brice’s Crossroads was heavily wooded, which could hide his inferior numbers. He could use feints to hold the advance column of Federal cavalry until his entire force moved into place. For the Union infantry to arrive in time, they would have to march quickly through narrow, muddy roads on a brutally hot and muggy day. The Northern boys would become exhausted, strung out, and therefore susceptible to flank attacks. With the enemy so deep in his territory, Forrest could follow up any success with unmerciful pursuit.
The engagement transpired almost precisely as he predicted. Forrest’s men bagged all but two Federal cannon, nearly every wagon, plus food, weapons, horses, and more than sixteen hundred prisoners.102
In contrast, his most infamous act is undoubtedly the butchery at Fort Pillow, Tennessee. On April 12, 1864, Forrest and his men surrounded a Federal garrison stationed on the Mississippi near Memphis. After a short battle, the fort surrendered. Angered by the presence of three hundred African American soldiers among the garrison of nearly six hundred, the victorious Confederates began to kill prisoners, including the wounded. More than two hundred Federals perished, plus another one hundred were seriously wounded. Forrest lost just fourteen killed. Though the actions were excused by the Confederate government as a natural result of battle, and condemned in the Union as a massacre, evidence suggests the latter. Although not ordering the killing, Forrest expressed no remorse for the incident.103
Ingenious in limited operations, Forrest’s tangible contribution to the Confederate effort was relatively small. A common observation about this otherwise brilliant tactician was that he played a large part in small battles and a small part in large battles.
In April and May 1863 Forrest pursued a long-range Union raid into Alabama led by Col. Abel D. Streight. On May 3 he cornered his prey, roughly fifteen hundred Federals, with only six hundred men. To mask his inferior numbers from Streight, Forrest shifted a single gun in and out of sight several times while negotiating surrender terms for the Federals. After capitulating and discovering the ruse, Streight protested. Forrest replied, “Ah, Colonel, all’s fair in love and war.”
Compared to other military conflicts, the American Civil War was not unique in its display of inept military leadership. If anything, the war’s duration of four long years provided time for corrective measures. A number of underachieving generals resigned of their own accord while others progressed from mediocrity to varying degrees of competence. To monitor poor performers, Confederate officials created a Bureau of the War while the Federals constructed the sometimes helpful, sometimes libelous Committee on the Conduct of the War. Wounds, disease, and accidents pruned several more bad generals, but there remained a wide array of individuals worthy of harsh criticism.104
Perhaps hundreds of generals were less competent than the ten listed here. These ten, however, lost more ground, created more problems, squandered more time, and achieved fewer gains with more men than any other commanding officers in the war. Some failed through recklessness, others by receding. Some communicated too little while others said far too much. A few spent all of their time preparing while others prepared not at all. Each man won at least one battle. Not one indicated he knew how to win a war.
1. Braxton Bragg (C.S., North Carolina, 1817–76)
With thatch brows, dark eyes, and thistle beard, Braxton Bragg’s countenance was appropriately that of a cornered animal. To his subordinates, he was vindictive, contrary, and deceitful. In combat he repeatedly committed horrible mistakes. He ruled by fear and executed scores of his soldiers for slight infractions. Although few could question his bravery, Bragg often questioned everyone else’s, yet he maintained the trust and devotion of a powerful army buddy, Confederate president Jefferson Davis.
The tragic play began in 1862 at SHILOH, where Bragg ordered several small, unsupported bayonet charges into well-defended artillery positions. When his men were summarily slaughtered, he blamed their immediate officers. For his brazen aggressiveness, Bragg received a promotion.105
Later in 1862 Bragg initiated a campaign into Kentucky with no clear objectives. Encountering heavy opposition at Perryville, he again employed piecemeal attacks and again lost lives with no result, abandoning more than three thousand of his dead and wounded on the field. Bragg’s tactics were so inept and baseless, fellow officer Henry Heth feared Bragg had “lost his mind.”106
In overall command at STONES RIVER, Bragg finally attempted a unified attack—over completely unsuitable terrain. Several regiments became easy targets as they advanced across open ground. Others had to sift through heavily wooded areas, losing contact with their support flanks. Miraculously, his men achieved early successes, but Bragg followed up with uncoordinated forays upon the best-defended section of the enemy line. Of the eighty-eight Confederate regiments at Stones River, twenty-three of them suffered 40 percent casualties or more. According to Bragg, victory evaded him because his officers displayed neither courage nor cooperation.107
His one major victory came at CHICKAMAUGA, due primarily to a well-timed attack by JAMES LONGSTREET. Still, the Federals slipped away when they might have been destroyed in full. For this Bragg again chastised his men. An exasperated Longstreet wrote, “I am convinced that nothing but the hand of God can save us or help us as long as we have our present commander.”108
His last great fight and greatest failure occurred over the key rail junction of CHATTANOOGA. Bragg held the high ground of Missionary Ridge to the east and towering Lookout Mountain to the southwest, nearly surrounding a half-starved Union garrison trapped in the town below. His positions should have been impregnable. When ULYSSES S. GRANT and heavy Federal support rescued the garrison and routed Bragg, Grant wrote, “The victory of Chattanooga was won against great odds…and was accomplished more easily than was expected by reason of Bragg’s making several grave mistakes.” Once again, Bragg accused his junior officers for the failure.109
After Chattanooga, Jefferson Davis recalled Bragg to Richmond—to serve as his chief military adviser.
2. George B. McClellan (U.S., Pennsylvania, 1826–85)
When George B. McClellan took command in the East after the disaster at FIRST MANASSAS (First Bull Run), the Union’s future suddenly looked brighter. Second in his class at West Point in 1846, an honorable fighter in the Mexican War, published author on modern European warfare, and leader of the victorious Ohio volunteers in western Virginia, McClellan reorganized a ragged mob into the disciplined and confident Army of the Potomac. Although he was a brilliant organizer, McClellan was also narcissistic, uncooperative, racist, delusional, and openly hostile toward his superiors. The press dubbed him the Young Napoleon.
Perhaps the newspapers should have specified which Napoleon. During his first eight months at the head of the largest and best-equipped army on earth, McClellan did not mount a single major offensive. Once in command, he became cautious and paranoid, constantly claiming his army of 110,000 was vastly outnumbered. In the spring of 1862 McClellan estimated there were 200,000 well-armed Rebels between Washington and Richmond. In fact there were fewer than 60,000. In his Peninsula campaign into Virginia, a force of just 13,000 stopped his 60,000 outside of Yorktown. At ANTIETAM, McClellan feared he was outnumbered more than two to one. The opposite was true, confirmed by captured enemy orders he had seen days before.110
Among the very worst in the art of communications, he gave vague orders and rarely if ever consulted his officers. Always nearby to receive the accolades of his troops during a grand review, he was conspicuously absent when the firing started. Case in point, McClellan was safely aboard a gunboat on the James River, far away from the action, when his troops threw back ROBERT E. LEE at the battle of Malvern Hill. Clueless that his army had just scored a major victory, McClellan somehow assumed the opposite was true, and he ordered his men to retreat.111
An emotional man, McClellan was prone to sending contradictory if not accusatory messages, as was the case during the battle of Gaines’s Mill. McClellan telegraphed Lincoln to report an imminent victory only to recant soon after with stories of impending ruin, adding: “If I save this army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or to any other persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this army.” Fortunately for McClellan, an officer at the War Department deleted this portion of the message.112
His worst trait may have been the ferocity with which he fought his allies. He quarreled with cabinet members and repeatedly referred to Lincoln as a baboon, an ape, and the “original gorilla.” During the battle of SECOND MANASSAS, McClellan refused to send reinforcements to John Pope’s short-lived Army of Virginia. For his uncoordinated and poorly timed attacks at Antietam, he blamed his friend AMBROSE E. BURNSIDE.
Relieved of command in October 1863, McClellan fought Lincoln one more time—as the Democratic nominee during the 1864 presidential election. Fittingly, thousands within the Confederacy viewed McClellan’s potential election as their last great hope to win the war.113
McClellan’s West Point classmates chose him Most Likely to Succeed.
3. Ambrose E. Burnside (U.S., Indiana, 1824–81)
If Jefferson Davis can be condemned for letting sentimental favorites remain as generals far too long, Ambrose E. Burnside is proof that Lincoln can be accused of the same.
Quiet, honest, personable, humble to a fault, Burnside drove himself relentlessly, often without sleep, to compensate for a lack of military talent few acknowledged more readily than himself. Yet Burnside had a remarkable start. In early 1862 he led a series of combined land and naval operations along the North Carolina coast, bagging islands, ships, forts, seaports, railheads, and thousands of Confederates.114
After George B. McClellan’s costly yet fruitless Peninsula campaign, Lincoln offered the Army of the Potomac to Burnside. Taken aback, the loyal friend of McClellan rejected the offer. Lincoln pocketed the proposal but noted the modest integrity of this different kind of general. After the egocentric John Pope failed at Second Manassas, Lincoln again asked Burnside to take the helm in the eastern theater, and again he refused. When McClellan stalled after the battle of ANTIETAM, Lincoln once more offered command of the Army of the Potomac to Burnside, in spite of the tragedy at BURNSIDE’S BRIDGE. Burnside reluctantly accepted.115
It did not take long for Burnside to give credence to his humility. Just weeks after taking command, he orchestrated the disaster at FREDERICKSBURG. As was his nature, he accepted full responsibility and tendered his resignation. It was now Lincoln’s turn to reject the offer, and Burnside stayed in command. Burnside then took his army on the infamous Mud March, where he attempted to flank Lee by crossing the Rappahannock farther upstream. Just as he began, a rare January downpour, along with trudging feet and turning wheels, churned the dirt roads into a massive trap. Rather than stop, Burnside moved ahead. Wagons sank axle deep, soldiers fell exhausted, cannon were lost, and mules drowned. After three days Burnside finally called it off, and Lincoln transferred him to Ohio.116
For all his integrity and confessed limitations, Burnside cannot be reduced to a magnet of poor luck. He habitually gave ambiguous information and instructions, showed minimal attention to supply or discipline, and rarely planned further than his next move. These deficiencies could not have been better illustrated than his 1864 return to command of the Ninth Corps of the Army of the Potomac outside Petersburg, where he watched his scheme of the crater end in bloody confusion.117
Before the war, Burnside walked down the aisle with his Kentucky fiancée, who suddenly changed her mind at the altar and dumped him.
4. Leonidas Polk (C.S., North Carolina, 1806–64)
One of three clergymen to become a Confederate general, tall, elegant Leonidas Polk had a battle résumé that read like a hit parade of Confederate failures: Kentucky, SHILOH, STONES RIVER, Atlanta.
Before the war he had befriended cadet Jefferson Davis at West Point, but he resigned from the army after graduation to join the ministry. Over a span of thirty-four years Polk became Episcopal bishop of Louisiana, attained a sprawling plantation and four hundred slaves, and served not a single day in the armed forces. When the war broke out, his old friend Davis made him a major general.118
For Davis and his cause, Polk created a string of disasters, primarily because of his persistent unwillingness to follow orders. First was his 1861 blunder at Columbus, Kentucky, followed in 1862 with BRAXTON BRAGG’S invasion of the Bluegrass State, where Polk again played the shortsighted maverick. Under orders to attack the right flank of Don Carlos Buell outside of Perryville while Edmund Kirby Smith was to hit Buell’s front, Polk decided it was too dangerous and retreated to safer ground. He neglected to inform his associates of this last-minute withdrawal, condemning Smith’s men to defeat.
In the bloodbaths of SHILOH, STONES RIVER, and CHICKAMAUGA, Polk continued old habits: conducting independent actions without conferring with fellow officers, issuing nebulous orders, showing no talent for offensive or defensive tactics, and sporting none of the intelligence that friends assumed this tall, ivory-haired preacher possessed.
The incompetence ended outside Atlanta in June 1864. Gens. JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON, William Hardee, and Polk scaled a hill to observe enemy operations north of the city. Two incoming Federal artillery shells encouraged the party to take leave of their vantage, but when Polk turned back for a last look, a cannonball slammed through his chest, killing him instantly.119
Polk was apparently more proficient as a minister than as a general. During the war, he baptized Gens. Joseph E. Johnston and John Bell Hood, and performed the ceremony at John Hunt Morgan’s wedding.
5. Earl Van Dorn (C.S., Mississippi, 1820–63)
Earl Van Dorn commanded Confederate forces in two pivotal battles in the West. He lost them both—badly.
Graduating from the U.S. Military Academy near the bottom of the Class of 1842, Van Dorn became a favorite of fellow Mississippian Jefferson Davis when they served together during the war with Mexico. His gentle face topped with thick, curly locks gave Van Dorn a somewhat effeminate appearance, yet in his service on the American frontier, the Second Seminole War, and the Mexican War, he displayed an almost psychotic affinity for combat.120
Given the rank of major general in 1861, he took command of the enormous Confederate Trans-Mississippi District. With bravado as mammoth as his jurisdiction, he pledged to push north, take St. Louis, and bring Border State Missouri into the Confederacy. In the ensuing March 7–8, 1862, battle of Pea Ridge, Van Dorn’s seventeen thousand troops easily outnumbered Samuel Curtis’s eleven thousand Federals, but the cavalier Van Dorn was not prepared. He had long ignored the physical needs of his men, and he was about to pay a heavy price. Trudging through the mud and snow, his men were short on warm clothes and rations. Deprived of weapons and sufficient ammunition, hundreds of his soldiers went into battle armed with squirrel rifles and shotguns. Many in his three brigades of Native Americans opted for more dependable bows and hatchets. Cold, hungry, outgunned, his troops were easily routed in what historian James McPherson called “the most one-sided victory won by an outnumbered Union army during the war.”121
In October 1862 Van Dorn attempted to redeem his Pea Ridge failure with an assault upon the rail junction at Corinth, Mississippi. Combining his ten thousand men with Sterling Price’s eleven thousand, the Confederates brought equal numbers against the Union side. The Federals, however, were dug in well, supported by backup trench works and considerable reserves. For two days Van Dorn smashed away at the Union center. A few of his troops broke through only to be wiped out by the hundreds of bluecoats waiting in the inner network of embankments.122
Broken militarily and by some accounts mentally, Van Dorn disengaged, only to double back with the intent of attacking Corinth again. Demoralized and depleted (one brigade lost 1,295 of 1,895 soldiers), his junior officers talked him out of it. The Confederate army never again mounted a major offensive in Mississippi.123
He later served with greater ability as a cavalry commander, but his legacy cost the Confederacy dearly. Other generals lost cities, supply depots, hilltops. Van Dorn lost most of Missouri and Mississippi in the first two years of the war.
Earl Van Dorn met an untimely end when an outraged husband, Dr. George Peters, entered the general’s headquarters at Spring Hill, Tennessee, and murdered him. Allegedly, Van Dorn had assailed one breastworks too many.
6. John C. Frémont (U.S., Georgia, 1813–90)
Famed as the Pathfinder for his explorations through the Rockies, former governor and senator of California and first presidential candidate for the Republican Party, youthful, self-assured, charismatic John Charles Frémont was one of the most famous American public figures in 1861.
His credentials landed him command of the enormous Union Department of the West, which was basically Illinois and everything west of the Mississippi. Unfortunately for the Union, Frémont proved to be one of the most cocky, undisciplined, witless generals in blue, incapable of controlling himself or his territory. From his headquarters in St. Louis, Frémont surrounded himself with a staff of swinish lackeys, handed out lucrative government weapon and ordnance contracts like shark bait, and neglected to define how or if he was going to create stability among a bitterly divided populace. A devastating Union loss at wilson’s creek in southwest Missouri, followed by escalating guerrilla activity in the state’s western counties, inspired Frémont to panic.
On August 30, 1861, Frémont declared martial law in Missouri, threatened to execute captured guerrillas, and vowed to emancipate the slaves of those sympathetic to the enemy. In one motion he managed to outrage loyal Missourians, the Confederate military, and the four slave states not yet lost to secession, all without a single military success to make such a proclamation credible.
Lincoln, ever the calculating moderate, deftly suggested Frémont revise his statement. In response, Frémont sent his wife, Jessie, to Washington to inform the president how inappropriate it was for Lincoln to muzzle her intellectually superior husband. Lincoln in turn exercised superior authority and transferred Frémont to the Shenandoah Valley.
Lincoln’s reassignment of the brash Frémont helped placate the Union faithful within the Border States and ended talk of retaliatory executions of Federal soldiers, but it also gave Frémont another chance to embarrass the president. The Pathfinder could not find his courage in the Valley, proving lethargic, timid, unorganized, and an easy target for THOMAS J. “STONEWALL” JACKSON at the battle of Cross Keys.124
After his defeat in the Shenandoah, Frémont was reassigned as a corps commander under the lower-ranked John Pope. Rather than acquiesce, Frémont resigned and spent the remainder of his fruitless war awaiting reassignment.125
While stationed in St. Louis, John C. Frémont maintained a force of 150 bodyguards.
7. Nathaniel P. Banks (U.S., Massachusetts, 1816–94)
Born among the spinning mills of Massachusetts and working in them as a child, Nathaniel Prentiss Banks became the quintessential self-made success. He taught himself Latin, Spanish, and classic literature, served in the U.S. Congress, and became president of a railroad. Honest, industrious, a prominent antislavery voice while governor of Massachusetts, he received an appointment as a major general of U.S. Volunteers despite having no military experience whatsoever.
Fond of the frills and splendor of his rank, Banks had the misfortune of contesting generals of better substance. In May 1862 THOMAS J. “STONEWALL” JACKSON took three days to push Banks completely out of the Shenandoah Valley. Having swiped supplies from him almost routinely in the affair, Jackson’s men called Banks “Old Jack’s commissary general.” Jackson bettered Banks again later that summer, routing the former governor days before SECOND MANASSAS.126
Transferred in early 1863 to replace volatile BENJAMIN F. BUTLER in the Department of New Orleans, Banks attempted to absolve his past shortcomings by striking at Port Hudson, Louisiana, and its fortifications along the Mississippi. Three frontal assaults yielded nothing but thousands of casualties. Only when upriver VICKSBURG fell to ULYSSES S. GRANT did Port Hudson surrender.
Finally, there was the spring 1864 Red River campaign, a dismal, fractured foray into northern Louisiana. Lincoln believed it could snare tons of cotton, inspire clandestine Unionists, and demonstrate Federal might in the far West. As with most disasters, things began well. Working in tandem with a fleet of gunboats and ironclads under Adm. David D. Porter, Banks and fifteen thousand men proceeded north along the river with minimal trouble. Then Banks marched away from the river and his naval support, and Confederates routed his isolated forces in a string of engagements. Banks in fact won several of these battles only to retreat each time. For his efforts, Banks lost eight thousand men, sixty pieces of artillery, and nearly a dozen ships. A subsequent congressional investigation was nearly as unkind to Banks as the Confederates had been. Banks’s superior officer Grant casually referred to the incident as “Banks’ disaster.”127
Before the war, Nathaniel Banks, Ambrose E. Burnside, and George B. McClellan worked for the Central Illinois Railroad, a company that also called upon the legal services of an attorney named Abraham Lincoln.
8. John Bell Hood (C.S., Kentucky, 1831–79)
As a commander of a brigade or division, the gallant Texas émigré with the hound-dog eyes could count himself among the more able of the Confederacy. As head of an army, his tenure was arguably the worst of the entire war.
Initially, courage alone served Hood well. He led his Texas Brigade to glory in the battles of the SEVEN DAYS, where his men hit and drove the Federals at Gaines’s Mill. In vicious combat near the Dunker church at ANTIETAM, his men were the bedrock of the Confederate defenses. At GETTYSBURG he was knocked out early with a severely wounded arm. He then lost a leg at CHICKAMAUGA while leading his men into the fray.128
While his exploits contained elements of astute bravery, they were also seeded with portents of his limitations. Hood was continually inattentive to matters of logistics, supply, and communication. He was also ignorant to the benefits of swift couriers and competent staff, prone to blame others while praising himself, and as it turned out, not a brilliant fighter after all.129
Impatient with JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON’S strategy of gradual withdrawal in Georgia, Jefferson Davis replaced Johnston with Hood. At the head of the Army of Tennessee, Hood moved to the offensive and lost battles in quick order: Peachtree Creek, Atlanta, Ezra Church, and JONESBORO.
Coming to the conclusion he could not stop the rolling Union army directly, Hood planned to lure them away from Georgia by marching north toward Union states. It did not work. Elated with the progress he was making in Hood’s absence, WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN responded, “If he will go to the Ohio River I’ll give him rations.”130
While Sherman and sixty thousand Federals marched largely uncontested across Georgia, Hood plodded north to horrendous slaughter at FRANKLIN and Nashville. In a month’s time Hood managed to turn the second largest army of the Confederacy, more than forty thousand strong, into a decimated and demoralized mob of twelve thousand.131
After the bloodbath at Franklin, Hood did the same thing Burnside did after Fredericksburg and Grant did after the Wilderness: He wept uncontrollably.
9. Benjamin F. Butler (U.S., New Hampshire, 1818–93)
Rotund, balding, cross-eyed, gravel-voiced, Benjamin F. Butler was a walking contradiction. He favored states’ rights, yet he threatened to arrest the Maryland legislature if it tried to secede. An ardent Democrat, he won the hearts of Radical Republicans for his protection of runaway slaves as “contraband.” In the 1850s he was a political champion for women’s rights, yet his infamous 1862 Woman’s Order directed the women of New Orleans who showed any disrespect to a Union soldier to be treated as prostitutes. He was among the first to employ weapons of the future, such as observation balloons and the Gatling gun, yet he was one of the most backward as a tactician. Proof of his incompetence emerged at Big Bethel, Virginia, the first land battle of the war. Butler’s seven regiments outnumbered the opposition four to one. Yet Butler’s poorly directed columns fired on each other before the battle even started, accounting for one-third of the Federal casualties in the defeat.132
Recovering his reputation somewhat with successful land and naval operations in North Carolina, Butler was assigned to the captured city of New Orleans. He subdued the hostile population with ruthless measures, including seizure of property, his Woman’s Order, and hanging a civilian for removing a Union flag from a Federal building. Butler’s harshness and alleged profiteering persuaded Lincoln to relocate him.133
After security work in riot-prone New York, the still influential Butler secured a chance to take the Confederate capital in May 1864. Grant ordered Butler to advance on Richmond from the southeast while he occupied Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia to the northeast. Landing thirty-three thousand men on a Virginia peninsula called the Bermuda Hundred, Butler planned to take Richmond and its few thousand defenders just fifteen miles distant. But first he set up a base camp and lost ten precious days. A numerical superiority of roughly twelve to one dwindled to even numbers as the Confederates rushed in reinforcements, eventually attacking Butler and pushing him back to his landing site.
There was one last opportunity to redeem himself. Guarding the cape below Wilmington, North Carolina, was Fort Fisher, an L-shaped earth-and-lumber menace hundreds of yards long and sporting forty-seven cannon. It was the last stronghold protecting the final open port of the Confederacy. Grant instructed Butler to reduce the fort. Butler figured a boat filled with 215 tons of explosives would do, followed by an amphibious assault. Detonated too far away, the floating bomb left the fort’s soft outerworks unharmed. After a weak naval bombardment, Butler sent in landing parties, only to withdraw them soon after with light casualties. Later in the war, while defending his actions to a congressional committee, Butler proclaimed that nothing but a prolonged siege could possibly subdue the mighty bastion. During his deposition, news came to the meeting that Fort Fisher had just surrendered to Butler’s replacement.134
For Butler’s iron-fisted occupation of New Orleans in 1862, Jefferson Davis offered a reward for his capture, dead or alive—even though Butler had nominated Davis for U.S. president fifty-seven times during the 1860 Democratic National Convention.
10. Joseph E. Johnston (C.S., Virginia, 1807–91)
The man looked like a general: dignified, proud, intelligent, with a presence as clean and smart as his reputation. Joseph E. Johnston also knew how to act like a general, offering nothing but punishment to the cowardly, giving commendations and furloughs to the brave, performing acts of indisputable wizardry with organization, morale, maneuvers, and supply. His adversaries, Sherman and Grant in particular, considered him one of the most able generals the South offered. Yet Johnston had one enduring fault: He continually surrendered ground.135
In command of Virginia’s defenses at the beginning of the Peninsula campaign, the outnumbered Johnston forced the Army of the Potomac to a crawl, preventing any major assaults or flanking maneuvers. GEORGE B. MCCLELLAN and company progressed just fifty miles in two months, but those fifty miles included nearly everything between the York and James Rivers, from the Atlantic Ocean to the gates of Richmond. Only after being wounded in the battle of Seven Pines (a.k.a. Fair Oaks) was Johnston relieved of command and replaced permanently with ROBERT E. LEE.136
East of Vicksburg in the late spring of 1863, Johnston regressed again, where his aversion to chance spared his army but allowed the Federals to surround and eventually conquer the citadel on the Mississippi. Sent east to Georgia in 1864 to replace BRAXTON BRAGG after the debacle at Chattanooga, Johnston restored order, rations, morale, and his policy of steady withdrawal. In ten weeks he gave up one hundred miles, backing ever southward, until his opponent came within sight of Atlanta. His exasperated president replaced him with the aggressive JOHN BELL HOOD.
An admiring infantryman in the First Tennessee Volunteers, Sam Watkins boasted, “History does not record a single instance of where one of his lines was ever broken—not a single rout.” To accomplish this, Johnston relinquished towns, cities, rail lines, and thousands of square miles, and with them he forever lost the physical and political support they once provided. His reliance on strategic withdrawal might have worked had he a Russian winter or a row of Urals to hide behind or foreign allies to reward his pesky endurance with armed intervention. His promises of mighty counterattacks, however, went unfulfilled, and his stubborn but steady retreats offered little beyond a slow death for a South that could not spare the ground or the time.137
In 1891, out of respect for his fallen former enemy, Joseph E. Johnston refused to wear a hat in the bitter cold of William Tecumseh Sherman’s funeral procession. In ten days Johnston was dead of pneumonia.
Compared to other battles in U.S. history, Civil War engagements were exceedingly lethal. The amphibious landing of 110,000 at Iwo Jima cost 5,931 American lives and wounded 17,372 more. Roughly the same numbers and losses were involved at CHICKAMAUGA, but Iwo Jima spanned thirty-six days. Chickamauga lasted thirty-six hours. In Vietnam the ten-day battle for Ap Bia (a.k.a. Hamburger Hill) killed 46 Americans. The Fifth New York Regiment lost almost three times as many men in one hour at Second Manassas.
Most of the worst battles in the Civil War had two factors: large armies and ROBERT E. LEE. Nine of the top ten bloodiest battles involved one hundred thousand soldiers or more, and seven involved Lee.
The following battles have the ten highest counts of combined killed and wounded. Add the casualties of the missing and captured, and the total losses are thousands greater.138
1. Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (July 1–3, 1863; 33,000 Killed or Wounded)
The bloodiest battle ever in North America was also among the largest, with a combined number of combatants exceeding 160,000. It was also one of the harshest in terms of percentage. The North endured 21 percent casualties; the South lost 30 percent killed, wounded, missing, or captured—the worst Confederate dispossession of the entire war.
The first day began with a chance encounter of Union cavalry and a Confederate brigade northwest of Gettysburg. As couriers fled back to warn the main forces, advanced units fought for control of the town. By nightfall the Confederates held Gettysburg while the Union held higher ground to the south. Already, hundreds were dead or dying.
The worst of the second day came when Union Gen. Daniel E. Sickles moved his corps forward (west) in hopes of gaining a better vantage point but creating a conspicuous bulge on the left side of the Union line. Late in the afternoon, Confederate forces launched into him. Once nameless country fields became immortalized as hallowed sites in American history: the Peach Orchard, the Wheatfield, Devil’s Den. Portions of ground exchanged hands six times.
The third day brought the catastrophic PICKETT’S CHARGE. Half of the thirteen thousand infantry sent forward against Union forces on Cemetery Ridge did not return.
More than three thousand horses were killed at Gettysburg.
Gettysburg was the largest battle of the war, and consequently the three days of fighting are perceived as the most heroic by both sides.
At Chickamauga the tide of battle turned with the timely arrival of Longstreet’s corps—temporarily attached to Bragg’s army in the fall of 1863.
2. Chickamauga, Georgia (September 19–20, 1863; 28,400 Killed or Wounded)
East of a meandering creek, a Confederate line ran north and south for four miles. The Southerners were led by stubborn, luckless, and vain BRAXTON BRAGG, who was fixed on dislodging William S. Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland from northern Georgia. Tangled in dense woods and heavy thicket, with troops deployed in darkness, each side lost track of regiments and reserves. Dense smoke from batteries and rifle volleys only added to the confusion. Rosecrans attempted to close an imaginary gap in his lines but created a real one nearly a quarter-mile wide. Confederate Gen. JAMES LONGSTREET, having recently arrived with reinforcements from the Virginia Theater, rammed eleven thousand men through the opening. Union brigades fought fiercely to repulse the infiltration, which simply encouraged the Confederates to commit more men to the effort.139
In the end, the Confederates took the field, but at the price of 26 percent casualties. Of 66,300 Confederate effectives, more than 2,300 were killed and 14,700 wounded. The Union lost 1,700 killed and almost 10,000 wounded out of 58,200 engaged. Rosecrans suffered almost 20 percent casualties and retreated in haste to Chattanooga, where he was summarily relieved of his duties.140
Chickamauga is said to be a Cherokee word meaning “River of Blood.”
3. Antietam, Maryland (September 17, 1862; 23,400 Killed or Wounded)
Close on the heels of his stunning victory at Second Manassas, Lee marched into Maryland with fifty-one thousand men. In opposition, GEORGE B. MCCLELLAN had seventy-five thousand. Unlike their ever-hesitant commander, the boys in blue were aching to end a string of defeats and stalemates, willing to push harder on the enemy than ever before. McClellan’s men caught up to Lee’s outnumbered force outside Sharpsburg, Maryland, along winding Antietam Creek. The ensuing battle was more like three battles.
North of town, a Union cannon barrage broke through a morning mist, cutting into a forty-acre corn field that hid the Confederate left flank. With waves numbering in the thousands, attacks and counterattacks flooded across the tree-lined fields. When the Confederates fell back, five thousand Federals rushed after them, entering a forested area known as the West Woods. Rebel reinforcements were waiting for them. Nearly half of the Union soldiers who entered the woods were killed or wounded in twenty minutes.
Fighting then shifted to the center of the line, where a Union division stumbled upon twenty-five hundred Confederates sheltered in a sunken farm road. A fight for the position escalated, and reserves from both sides ran into the fray. After three hours, the bluecoats gained a position where they could fire down the length of the road, breaking the Confederate hold. Approximately five thousand men were wounded or killed in a place known afterward as Bloody Lane.141
Later that day, on the south end of the line, Union Gen. AMBROSE E. BURNSIDE forced his corps across Antietam Creek at a single, narrow stone trestle later called BURNSIDE’S BRIDGE. Confederate Gen. Robert A. Toombs positioned his understaffed brigade with brilliant dispatch, inflicting horrible, constant, and easy damage upon Burnside’s charging regiments. Despite their successes, the Confederates’ right flank started to give way under the weight of Union numbers, until A. P. Hill’s division arrived at 4:00 p.m. from recently conquered Harpers Ferry and slammed into the Union left, adding to the horrible totals.142
More than five thousand soldiers died at Antietam, making September 17, 1862, the single bloodiest day in U.S. military history.
After the battle, surviving members of the Tenth Georgia counted forty-six new bullet holes in their regimental flag.
Despite Union blundering, victory was at hand—until the arrival of A. P. Hill’s division broke the Federal attack.
4. The Wilderness, Virginia (May 5–6, 1864; 22,000 Killed or Wounded)
ULYSSES S. GRANT, recently named to head the affairs of the eastern theater, chose to begin the 1864 campaign in the early days of May. Starting from their winter encampment near Washington, Grant and the Army of the Potomac headed southwest toward ROBERT E. LEE and his armies near Orange Court House.
Outnumbered, with the opposition approaching, Lee engaged his new nemesis in the thicket called the Wilderness, using the dense brush and narrow roads to negate Union supremacy in numbers and artillery. The plan worked but not without consequences. Officers and men from both sides quickly became lost. Fellow regiments fired on each other. By necessity, fighting occurred in extremely close proximity. Smoke, forest fires, and broken communication lines added to the terror.143
Lee’s gamble resulted in one of the most lopsided counts in the war. While the Confederates lost at least 7,750 men, Union casualties amounted to more than 12,100 wounded and 2,246 dead. Grant later wrote, “More desperate fighting has not been witnessed on the continent than that of the 5th and 6th of May.”144
An estimated eight hundred wounded men burned to death in the battle of the Wilderness, unable to crawl away from advancing brush fires.
The first engagement between Grant and Lee took the Federal commander by surprise. For Lee the surprise was that Grant did not retreat afterward.
At Chancellorsville, Lee defeated an overwhelming force through sheer audacity: dividing his army not once but twice in the face of superior numbers. His victory was not cheap, and some say the South never recovered from the loss of Stonewall Jackson, who was mortally wounded by his own men.
5. Chancellorsville, Virginia (May 1–4, 1863; 21,700 Killed or Wounded)
ROBERT E. LEE’S counterstrike at Chancellorsville came as a lethal surprise to Joseph Hooker’s Army of the Potomac. Outnumbered nearly two to one, Lee defied all logic and split his army of sixty thousand effectives three ways, allowing the battle to engage large portions of both armies simultaneously. Such aggressive tactics can (and in this case did) succeed if the initiative is maintained, which requires exceptionally lethal intensity of engagement. Lee and his army maintained the initiative for four days, defeating “Fighting Joe” Hooker and his Army of the Potomac.145
By the time the Union finally withdrew from the field, Hooker had lost 12 percent of his voluminous 110,000-man army. For his greatest tactical achievement, Lee sacrificed 19 percent of his men. The South also lost the irreplaceable corps commander THOMAS J. “STONEWALL” JACKSON, who rode into the darkness of May 2 looking for opportunities to mount a rare night assault. His own pickets mistook him for the enemy, mortally wounding Jackson and killing two of his staff.146
The raincoat Stonewall Jackson wore at Chancellorsville is currently on display at the Virginia Military Institute Museum in Lexington. Bullet holes are visible on the left sleeve.
6. Shiloh, Tennessee (April 6–7, 1862; 19,900 Killed or Wounded)
Inexperience can take credit for many of the losses at Shiloh. Eight out of ten men on the field had never experienced combat. There were few breastworks or trenches, allowing the two massive armies to come into very close contact. Once the fighting began, both sides took wrong turns, shot at their own troops, fumbled with communications, and fought without coordination. The chaos was too much for many green recruits, and thousands from both sides fled in panic.
In hopes of cracking the Union center at the outset, Confederates concentrated eighteen thousand men on a sunken road held by forty-five hundred Union men under Brig. Gen. Benjamin M. Prentiss. Rather than simply contain them, the Rebels launched eleven assaults and a sixty-two-gun barrage into the Union stronghold. Nearly all of Prentiss’s men were killed, wounded, or captured in what became known as the Hornets’ Nest.
A massive counterattack on the second day allowed the Union to take the field. Perhaps most tragic, there were inadequate plans in place on either side to care for the wounded. Hundreds died who might have otherwise been saved.
Before Shiloh, the bloodiest battle in the war had been FORT DONELSON (February 12–16, 1862) with forty-six hundred dead and wounded over five days. Shiloh surpassed those numbers in a matter of hours.147
Just before the Confederates stormed the Federal encampments, Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman sent a note off to U. S. Grant that read: “I do not apprehend anything like an attack on our position.”
News of the high casualties at Shiloh stunned the nation. Worse was to come.
7. Stones River, Tennessee (December 31, 1862–January 2, 1863; 18,450 Killed or Wounded)
The ground was no place for a battle. Flocks of dense timber divided the fields. Rugged broods of limestone rose from the soil. The passing river ran wide and slow. Hence, options for maneuver were few. Opportunities for getting lost, separated, or trapped were plentiful. William S. Rosecrans’s army of forty-one thousand was ready to push BRAXTON BRAGG’S Confederate army of thirty-five thousand out of Tennessee. Bragg was ready to return the favor. By December 31, 1862, the melee was on.
Facing off along the banks of Stones River, each side planned to ring in the new year with gunfire and victory. The Confederate Army of Tennessee struck first, hitting the right side (west) of the Federal Army of the Cumberland, launching a series of full-scale attacks. Rosecrans rallied his troops, his uniform stained with the blood and brains of a staff officer recently decapitated by artillery.
It was soon apparent that the right side of the Federal line was starting to bend backward, wheeling as if its left flank were hinged to the river. Bragg immediately resolved to break the hinge, an oak-ringed hill dubbed the Round Forest. Four separate Confederate waves rushed forward, the last coming within 150 yards of their objective. Each one fell in bloody heaps, butchered by fifty Union cannon and thousands of rifles barbing the hilltop.
New Year’s Day passed, and neither army moved. On January 2, against the wishes of his junior officers, Bragg sent forty-five hundred troops to take areas east of the river. Within an hour, fifty-eight Federal cannon and a fierce infantry counterattack reduced this number to twenty-eight hundred. Bragg quietly slipped away and left Tennessee to the Federals. The two armies did not fight again for six months.
In terms of numbers, the battle was modest. Chancellorsville involved more than twice the number of effectives, and Fredericksburg nearly three times. In terms of percentage, Stones River is the worst major engagement loss of Federal soldiers for the whole of the war, with more than 22 percent killed or wounded. The Confederates fared even worse, losing an astounding 27 percent. Most of the destruction transpired during the first ten hours.
The affair had cost so much so fast because it possessed a unique nature. For other battles, fighting was often sporadic. On the first day of Stones River, the sides clashed not in a few locations and not for short periods, but along the entire line through every minute of daylight.
On the night before the battle, bands from both sides played various tunes. When they began to play “Home Sweet Home,” thousands of voices from both sides joined in.
8. Fredericksburg, Virginia (December 13, 1862; 17,900 Killed or Wounded)
Along the west bank of the Rappahannock, halfway between Washington and Richmond, 200,000 soldiers faced each other on a front that stretched across six miles. Their backs to the river, the Federals held the numerical advantage with 122,000 on hand, but the Confederates held higher ground. The day began with a Federal assault of 50,000 upon the hills and woods to the south. Hours of bitter fighting and artillery duels dissolved the attack, and the battle swung to the north end of the line.
At 1 p.m., Union Gen. ambrose e. burnside committed one of the worst atrocities of the war by ordering tens of thousands of men against an impregnable position at MARYE’S HEIGHTS. Only the early winter nightfall ended the suicidal attacks. December 13, 1862, became the second bloodiest day in U.S. military history, outdone only by a previous battle involving another hideous blunder by Burnside.148
The night after the battle, Federals on the front line made protective breastworks by stacking corpses.
Fredericksburg began with a costly river crossing. The situation only worsened.
9. Second Manassas, Virginia (August 29–30, 1862; 17,200 Killed or Wounded)
Near Manassas Junction in late summer of 1862, John Pope, commander of the Federal Army of Virginia, let his massive ego get the better of him. On August 28 and 29, he falsely interpreted nearby maneuvers of the Army of Northern Virginia as a general retreat. Attacking piecemeal, he sent division after division of his thirty-two-thousand-man force into well-defended Confederate lines numbering more than twenty thousand.149
Stinging from defeat and bolstered by the arrival of thirty thousand reinforcements from the Army of the Potomac, Pope continued the attack the following day. What happened next was the largest collective attack of the Civil War.
JAMES LONGSTREET, having arrived the previous day with twenty-eight thousand men, countercharged with nearly his entire force (more than twice the number in PICKETT’S CHARGE at GETTYSBURG), destroying large portions of Pope’s command. Only a series of fierce and costly defensive stands prevented a complete rout of Union forces.150
In the Civil War, no Union brigade lost a higher proportion than the Indiana-Wisconsin Iron Brigade. Virginia’s Stonewall Brigade lost more men than any on either side. At Second Manassas, the two brigades had the misfortune of fighting each other.
The Manassas countryside was twice the scene of routed Federal armies.
Just days after their first encounter at the Wilderness, Lee and Grant clashed again, this time near the tiny crossroads village of Spotsylvania. The worst fighting occurred near a salient that came to be known as the Bloody Angle.
10. Spotsylvania, Virginia (May 7–12, 1864; 16,000 Killed or Wounded)
Second in the unholy trinity of the May 1864 Eastern campaign (Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor), Spotsylvania involved the most continuous hand-to-hand fighting of the war.
Anticipating ULYSSES S. GRANT’S attempt to wedge into Richmond by way of the crossroads town, ROBERT E. LEE beat him to it with enough time to create extensive trench works along strategic ridges. These included an odd muleshoe-shaped salient at the center of his lines. Union attacks on the Confederate flanks garnered nothing, but when a May 10 assault on this salient netted nearly one thousand prisoners, Grant decided to press the initiative.
On May 12, before dawn, a corps of sixteen thousand men in blue drove the defense works, taking the trenches and even more prisoners. Knowing his army had been split in two, Lee vowed to retake the position. The result was almost twenty hours of continuous combat amid heavy rain showers in an area covering a few acres. The killing churned the mud into a hue of deep crimson red. Men struggled to fight on top of piles of dead and wounded. Oak trees in the vicinity toppled over, their trunks gnawed away by bullets. By itself this contest for the Bloody Angle produced five thousand Confederate and seven thousand Union casualties.
After the battle, Union soldiers on burial detail came upon bodies piled four deep. Some had drowned in a mixture of corpses and mud. Several of the dead were so riddled with bullets as to appear, as one observer put it, “more like piles of jelly than the distinguishable forms of human life.”151
More Americans died at the Bloody Angle than at Omaha Beach on D-Day in 1944.
During and after the war, former prisoners and the press circulated stories of torture, deliberate starvation, and wanton acts of murder in enemy prison camps. Over the years there has been much debunking of such emotionally charged testimonials as acts of propaganda or malevolence.
In spite of ongoing blame and excuses, some disturbing arithmetic prevails. A Civil War soldier marching into battle stood a one-in-thirty chance of dying. If he stepped into one of the 150 stockades, warehouses, or forts serving as prison camps during the war, his odds fell to one in seven. More than fifty-seven thousand soldiers died in prison during the war, just shy of all American soldiers lost from all causes in Vietnam.
Carelessness, rather than conspiracy, appears to be the cause. Neither side was prepared nor motivated to care for the hordes of captured foes, the totals of which are phenomenal. More than 211,000 Union and 265,000 Confederate servicemen were captured, or about one out of every eight men who served. Many were spared prison time, that is, until the BREAKDOWN OF THE PRISONER EXCHANGE in 1863. Afterward, prisoner fatalities skyrocketed for want of services.
Many starved to death. Most died from disease, primarily typhoid, smallpox, dysentery, and diarrhea. Acts of torture occurred, as did remarkable moments of kindness. Some camps allowed enemy officers short furloughs, while others forbade shoeless men to possess as much as a blanket in the dead of winter.152
Listed here are the ten deadliest military prisons, based on very conservative numbers of prisoner fatalities at each institution.153
Andersonville’s indescribable squalor epitomized the worst of the prison camps.
1. Andersonville (C.S.)
| Location: | Andersonville, Georgia | |
| Capacity: | 10,000 | |
| Peak: | 33,000 | |
| Deaths: | 13,363 |
To this day, historians struggle to explain the horror of Andersonville. The name itself stands above all others as the most infamous of Civil War military prisons. Opened in February 1864, it was built to relieve the Richmond area of the drain of resources involved in housing thousands of Union captives. Regrettably, the remote location in central Georgia was poorly suited to hold so many men. Despite a severe shortage of resources, Andersonville became the fifth-largest population center in the Confederacy, occupying an area of less than twenty-seven acres.154
An open stockade surrounded by high timber walls, the place was officially known as Camp Sumter. No shelter was provided for the captives. Some prisoners managed to build crude huts out of scrap wood. Most used old tents, fashioned lean-tos, or clawed holes into the ground for protection from the sweltering sun and driving rains. A slow-running stream called Sweet Water Creek ran through the middle of camp and served as sewer, latrine, and water source.155
The inmates, all enlisted men, received meager rations. By August 1864 it was common for a day to pass without food. Guards often suffered the same fate, as did several Confederate armies elsewhere. Prisoner rations declined to mere tablespoons of grain or meat, often contaminated enough to permanently damage digestive systems. Grown men shrank to less than eighty pounds. Those who did not succumb to diarrhea, dysentery, gangrene, pneumonia, scurvy, suicide, or sunstroke were harassed by a large gang of camp “raiders” who worked together to harass, rob, and murder fellow inmates.156
After the war, many Northerners argued that for Andersonville alone, the South should suffer a vengeful reconstruction.
There is one lone U.S. National Park serving as a memorial to all American POWs in history. It is Andersonville.
2. Camp Douglas (U.S.)
| Location: | South Chicago, Illinois | |
| Capacity: | 6,000 | |
| Peak: | 12,000 | |
| Deaths: | 4,454 |
Federal victories at Forts Henry and Donelson in 1862 brought with them a burden of thousands of prisoners. In haste, officials at the Camp Douglas military training facility walled off an area to contain the influx.157
Initially, the prison of enclosed barracks functioned under capacity, and captives received adequate amounts of food and clothing. But after Union forces captured thousands more Confederates at shiloh and Island No. 10 in the spring of 1862, the facilities at Camp Douglas turned abysmal. Built in a low-lying area, the camp flooded easily, even after light rainfalls. Open latrines had no place to drain, creating a vast compound of deep filth and nauseating stench. During an inspection of the quarters in 1862, members of the U.S. Sanitary Commission were so repulsed by the conditions, they demanded the prison section of Camp Douglas be abandoned altogether. Camp officials dismissed the report.158
The winter of 1862–63 brought several weeks of subzero temperatures. Many of the barracks, some filled to twice their capacity, had no heat source. Roofs and walls were wrought with gaping holes. Some prisoners had no blankets or coats. With a prevalence of exposure, pneumonia, and typhoid, the death rate surpassed 10 percent a month, the highest of any camp in the war—including Andersonville.
Despite the death toll, the prison continued to operate with some engineering improvements into the summer of 1865.159
The Confederate dead of Camp Douglas are buried in at least five different places in Chicago. Not all burial sites are known, and it is believed some graves have undergone real estate development.
3. Point Lookout (U.S.)
| Location: | Point Lookout, Maryland | |
| Capacity: | 10,000 | |
| Peak: | 22,000 | |
| Deaths: | 3,584 |
Point Lookout is a sandy flat peninsula jutting between the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay. During the Civil War it was home to Camp Hoffman, a Federal military installation. Within its south walls sat a vast field of ragged tents, each filled far beyond its capacity with captive Confederates.
In response to the horrid conditions of Confederate prisons, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton forbade the construction of barracks at Point Lookout and elsewhere. He also permitted the reduction of prisoner rations. What made Point Lookout particularly inhumane was its cruel commandants who enforced Stanton’s mandates with impunity and further reduced distribution of firewood and blankets.160
Prisoners did have occasional access to the sea front, allowing them to bathe and scrounge for clams, dead birds, fish, oysters, and wharf rats. As much as the surrounding waters provided life, they also brought misery. Winter storms flooded the camp. Exposure and waterborne diseases killed hundreds a month. Wells within the stockade were thick with iron and salt, and everyone who drank from them became ill. The bay and the river acted as one vast moat, making escape nearly impossible.161
Opened in 1863, Point Lookout was supposed to be a temporary holding station, a stopover for prisoners bound for other camps. Instead, it became the largest Union prison in the war, holding at one time more than twenty-two thousand inmates.162
The first POWs to arrive at Point Lookout were captives from Gettysburg.
4. Salisbury (C.S.)
| Location: | Salisbury, North Carolina | |
| Capacity: | 2,000 | |
| Peak: | 10,000 | |
| Deaths: | 3,479 |
A textile plant before the war, the sixteen-acre heavily wooded Salisbury Camp opened in 1861 and was initially hospitable. Its first six hundred inmates were housed in a large four-story factory building and in smaller tenements. There were adequate provisions, lenient commandants, and occasional games of the new sport of baseball.163
By October 1864 five thousand new prisoners arrived, followed soon by thousands more, crammed into a camp designed for two thousand. Among the more than ten thousand prisoners were Confederate convicts. In this volatile mix, gang fights and murders were common.164
Food, space, clothing, and water shortages quickly became chronic. By winter of 1864, wells became contaminated, and a typhoid epidemic erupted. At one point nearly eighty men died every twenty-four hours. Piles of bodies were thrown into open burial pits. Clothes of the dead were given to the living. Men burrowed into the ground for shelter. Shoeless guards as young as twelve years old were nearly incapable of maintaining order, consequently giving rise to the number and frequency of prisoners murdering prisoners.165
Salisbury Prison had only one inmate die in its first two years of operation.
5. Elmira (U.S.)
| Location: | Elmira, New York | |
| Capacity: | 5,000 | |
| Peak: | 9,400 | |
| Deaths: | 2,993 |
Elmira Prison was, like Camp Douglas and Camp Hoffman, a military training camp converted into a stockade. Situated close to the Pennsylvania border and opened in July 1864, “Hellmira” was eight acres enclosed by twelve-foot-high fences. On the south side of the enclosure was a one-acre lagoon used as a latrine and sewer. Thirty-five single-story barracks were designed to hold ninety men each, but camp and government officials determined the barracks could accommodate twice as many.166
Most of the prisoners came from overcrowded Point Lookout. Thousands arrived sick and emaciated, with ragged clothes and no blankets. Barracks, including a few new ones constructed with prisoner labor, offered minimal protection from the elements. Tents were issued to address overcrowding, but even those were too few. Hundreds of prisoners lived continually in the open. In response to Southern prison conditions, Washington occasionally reduced rations to bread and water, creating a drastic rise in scurvy cases. The men began using dead rats as currency. Unsanitary conditions and poor medical treatment caused outbreaks of dysentery followed soon by eruptions of pneumonia and smallpox. With poor water, reduced rations, overcrowding, and rampant illness, Confederate prisoners began to die at a rate of ten a day.167
In 1865 the nearby Chemung River overran its banks. The St. Patrick’s Day Flood left as much as four feet of icy water in and around the barracks. Mud, refuse, and feces infiltrated everything, illnesses spread like wildfire, and March became the deadliest month in the camp’s year of service. In thirty-one days, 491 inmates died.168
Elmira had two observation towers constructed for onlookers. Citizens paid fifteen cents to gander at the inmates. Concession stands by the towers sold peanuts, cakes, and lemonade, while the men inside starved.
6. Florence (C.S.)
| Location: | Florence, South Carolina | |
| Capacity: | Unknown | |
| Peak: | 15,000 | |
| Deaths: | 2,973 |
In the autumn of 1864 thousands of inmates at Andersonville and elsewhere were informed they were paroled. All that was left was a long trip northward under heavy guard for an official exchange. In reality, Confederate officials were simply transferring these prisoners to a new stockade near Florence, South Carolina.
The disappointment was so extreme, and the conditions at Florence so decrepit, a great many POWs suffered mental breakdowns. Men experienced complete memory loss. Some spoke in babble or became mute. A few men dug holes, crawled in, and attempted to bury themselves.169
Veterans of Andersonville considered Florence worse. Both camps were open-air stockades, surrounded by walls of raw timber, with a small creek running through, and no permanent shelter. Food, clothing, and space, however, were even scarcer at Florence. Up to twelve thousand men occupied less than twenty-four acres, and six acres of it was unusable marshland. Often the only food was coarse flour, which men mixed with the creek water to eat as a mush. During some periods, men died at a rate of two per hour, and the dead were often left inside for days until new burial trenches could be dug. Dysentery and scurvy were most common. To promote “order,” guards occasionally shot prisoners.170
The sixth deadliest Civil War prison, Florence was in operation for just eighteen weeks.
7. Fort Delaware (U.S.)
| Location: | Pea Patch Island, Delaware | |
| Capacity: | 10,000 | |
| Peak: | 12,600 | |
| Deaths: | 2,460 |
Several Union prisons were labeled “Andersonville of the North.” Fort Delaware arguably deserves the comparison. Situated on an island of seventy acres, capped by a granite pentagonal fort with thirty-foot-thick, thirty-five-foot-high walls, and surrounded by dilapidated barracks, the coastal-bastion-turned-penal-colony received its first hundred prisoners in July 1861. Two years later, the inrush of captures at GETTYSBURG swelled the inmate count beyond twelve thousand. Hundreds of men who survived Devil’s Den and Pickett’s Charge died here.
Shelters were little more than shacks of rough pine board. Flies, mosquitoes, rats, and lice thrived in summer. Storms beat the island in winter. Prisoners were allowed to possess a coat or a blanket but not both. Many frigid mornings found men dead of exposure inside their barracks.171
Along with dismal rations, wet sandy ground, and wretched overcrowding, Fort Delaware’s cruelties began to include torture, fostered by Albin Francisco Schoepf, the camp commandant from the summer of 1863 to the war’s end. With his permission, prison guards employed gagging, hanging by thumbs, clubbing, random shootings, and other transgressions bordering on torture. As many as thirty thousand Confederates were confined here throughout the war.172
Among the inmates were nearly three thousand political prisoners, including Jefferson Davis’s private secretary Burton Harrison.
8. Camp Chase (U.S.)
| Location: | Columbus, Ohio | |
| Capacity: | 4,000 | |
| Peak: | 9,400 | |
| Deaths: | 2,260 |
Camp Chase was actually three sections, the first covering an acre, the second and third covering five acres each, with the entire complex surrounded by sixteen-foot double walls. When the camp first opened in 1862, prisoners enjoyed a degree of freedom.173
Officers and political prisoners could travel into Columbus, provided they signed an oath to not escape. In turn, townspeople toured the camp for a small fee. As the war worsened and tolerance for the Rebel presence waned, officers and political prisoners were transferred to another camp, and harsh discipline became the norm for those who remained. Guards strictly enforced order and often shot prisoners for minor infractions.174
As with so many of the worst prisons, Chase eventually suffered from overcrowding and poor drainage as well as food shortages and standing pools of feces. Prison barracks were small and shabby. Snow and rain seeped through roofs and floorboards. The autumn months of 1864 were the deadliest for inmates and guards; hundreds died from smallpox.175
The camp was named in honor of Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase.
9. Rock Island (U.S.)
| Location: | Rock Island, Illinois | |
| Capacity: | 10,000 | |
| Peak: | 8,600 | |
| Deaths: | 1,960 |
In the Mississippi River, barely three miles by one-half mile, rests aptly named Rock Island. In 1862 the U.S. government established an arsenal there and soon after created a small enclosure of prison barracks on the island’s north side.
In early December 1863 the first Confederate prisoners arrived, mostly captives from the battle of chattanooga. Weakened by hunger, illness, the cold, dehydration, and the brutal trek from the Georgia border by rail, men began to die right away. The first fatalities were from pneumonia, followed by diarrhea, exposure, and smallpox. Within weeks, the camp population climbed to six thousand, and the temperature fell below zero. Snow, wind, and ice sifted into the temporary barracks. Frostbite became prevalent. Eighty-six men were dead by Christmas. A week later a blizzard hit. There was yet no hospital.176
Disease and exposure claimed hundreds of lives each month. Once the weather warmed, the camp’s inadequate drainage became nauseatingly apparent. A marsh of excrement began to pool at the stockade’s southwest corner. Improvements were made in waste removal—nearly a year after the problem began. In total, around 16 percent of the prisoners perished.177
In the epic fiction Gone with the Wind, noble hero Ashley Wilkes was a POW at Rock Island.
10. Camp Morton (U.S.)
| Location: | Indianapolis, Indiana | |
| Capacity: | 2,000 | |
| Peak: | 5,000 | |
| Deaths: | 1,763 |
Constructed on the Indiana State Fairgrounds, the five-acre enclosure included five wells, undulating ground, and maple trees. A few large buildings served as quarters but were little more than barns and exhibition halls, with prisoners sleeping in animal stables or on the bare ground.178
Despite the efforts of a compassionate first commandant, Col. Richard D. Owen, the prisoners began to suffer from unimaginable overcrowding and open latrines. Rations lacking in vegetables caused a massive outbreak of scurvy. Over time the entire enclosure and all wells became contaminated with human waste. Resulting disease, combined with frigid winters, killed nearly 20 percent of those incarcerated. Hundreds attempted escape with limited success.179
After the war former prisoners returned to the site to build a monument dedicated to Colonel Owen.
Civil War enthusiasts love to dissect the remains of the war, and many cannot help but experiment with the variables. Second-guessing is hardest to curb when contemplating the major blunders of the war, when turning points failed to turn, when leaders failed to lead, when the biggest gambles went bust. Criticism, however, must be placed in context. Unlike students of the war, military leaders at the time rarely had accurate information, adequate time, second tries, or liberty from risk.
Excused from this topic are “failures to pursue the enemy,” when successful battles were not immediately followed by an aggressive chase (examples include Confederate victories at FIRST MANASSAS and CHICKAMAUGA, and Union wins at ANTIETAM and GETTYSBURG). Then and now, criticism against reluctant victors may be valid to a certain degree, but more often than not, the victor was as exhausted as the vanquished after heavy combat. Pursuit meant facing furious rearguard actions and defensive stands. Darkness, terrain, spent resources, and weather often negated the option to track down the defeated. Fresh reserve units, if there were any, were usually too small to take on the enemy’s main body.
Still, there were plenty of occasions where plans were beyond poor and execution bordered on the ridiculous. Presented in this list are the ten best examples of the worst military mistakes of the war, ranked by their cost in land, time, and lives lost.
1. Breakdown of the Prisoner Exchange (October 1863–January 1865)
A hidden benefit of the war’s slow start was the absence of a prisoner glut. By the summer of 1862, however, the gradual escalation of hostilities turned the trickle of military captives into a groundswell. To address the problem, the Federal and Confederate governments negotiated an agreement based on a War of 1812 cartel between Great Britain and the United States. Rather than confine captives, North and South chose to exchange prisoners of war, or failing that, to “parole” them, whereby soldiers were not to return to their units until notified they had been officially exchanged.
The system began to deteriorate during the September 1863 battle of CHICKAMAUGA. Federals discovered Confederate parolees in the battle who had not been exchanged. Prisoner trades halted altogether in late 1863 when the South retaliated against the Union’s formation of black regiments. The Confederate Congress and military refused equal treatment of white and black prisoners, going so far as to send former bondsmen back into slavery, subjecting others to hard labor, or executing black captives (done with chilling passion at the 1864 battles of Fort Pillow and the crater).180
Neither side made a serious effort to resolve the impasse, viewing the aging war as one of attrition, where resupplying the opposition with exchanged troops was considered counterproductive if not suicidal. What proved to be suicidal was the halting of the exchange. Prisons quickly filled to three times their capacity. Both sides were either unwilling or incapable of providing the medicines, transport, support staff, and rations necessary to service the hundreds of thousands incarcerated. With no outflow, a workable system reached critical mass, and prisoners began to die by the thousands. Not until January 1865 did the Confederacy consent to equal treatment of black and white prisoners, and the parole-exchange system resumed.181
During the war, and mostly during the fifteen-month period of the failed exchange, more than fifty-one thousand men died in military prisons. The death toll exceeded the number killed in action at GETTYSBURG, CHICKAMAUGA, ANTIETAM, THE WILDERNESS, CHANCELLORSVILLE, SHILOH, FIRST AND SECOND MANASSAS, STONES RIVER, COLD HARBOR, SPOTSYLVANIA, FREDERICKSBURG, PEA RIDGE, and WILSON’S CREEK combined. Moral issues aside, the physical cost of the exchange breakdown weakened both sides for the remainder of the war and for years to follow.
Approximately 470,000 soldiers were captured during the Civil War, which was more than the population of Arkansas at the time.
2. Hood’s Assault on Schofield (Battle of Franklin, November 30, 1864)
The whole of the battle of Franklin proper lasted just five hours, long enough for Confederate Gen. JOHN BELL HOOD to send the second largest Confederate army to its doom. Compared to PICKETT’S CHARGE, Hood attacked with nearly twice as many men (21,000), using almost no artillery support, covering twice as much open ground ( two miles), against better defenses. For this attempt, Hood lost more than thirty battle flags, thirteen generals killed or wounded, and 7,250 men dead, wounded, or missing. By comparison, the Union lost 2,300 dead, wounded, or missing.182
It began south of Atlanta as a scheme to halt WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN’S March to the Sea. While Sherman and sixty thousand Federals moved toward Savannah, Hood and thirty-five thousand Confederates headed in the opposite direction, hoping to cut Sherman’s supply line and force him to withdraw from Georgia. It worked—partially. Sherman sent thirty thousand men under John M. Schofield to aid GEORGE H. THOMAS’S force of equal size stationed in and near Nashville. When poor timing, execution, and planning allowed Schofield’s men to slip past his army at Spring Hill, Tennessee, Hood blamed his men for maintaining the costly caution of their former commander, JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON. An aggressive pursuit ensued.183
Hood caught up with Schofield at Franklin, fifteen miles south of Nashville. The Federals had dug in and repaired earlier fortifications along the southern edge of town. Hood’s artillery had not yet caught up with the infantry, and night was falling, but this did not deter the Confederate commander. Hood ordered the attack.
Hood’s mistake at Franklin cost the Confederacy a third of the entire Army of Tennessee, but his failure was not over. Two weeks after Franklin, at the battle of Nashville, Thomas and Schofield combined their armies—fifty-five thousand men—then swept down and decimated the twenty thousand effectives that remained of Hood’s army.184
Five Confederate generals died in three days at Gettysburg. Six Confederate generals died or were mortally wounded in less than four hours at Franklin.
3. Pillow’s Canceled Breakthrough (Battle of Fort Donelson, February 14–16, 1862)
In early 1862, during a single engagement, the South lost more men to capture than it had in all previous engagements of the war combined, more than all the casualties ROBERT E. LEE would suffer at CHANCELLORSVILLE, more than three times all the Confederate dead at GETTYSBURG.185
In northwest Tennessee, carved into a ridge of hills just north of Dover, stood Fort Donelson, the Confederacy’s Gibraltar of the Cumberland River. To defend the fort, thousands of Confederate soldiers from nearby areas poured in, until 17,500 held Donelson, the town, and three miles of trenches and rifle pits atop the surrounding hills. Last to arrive was a brigade under Gen. John B. Floyd, a man of no military experience beyond a few embarrassing defeats in northwest Virginia. Fortunately for the Union, Floyd was senior officer at the fort. Beneath Floyd was temperamental braggart extraordinaire Gideon J. Pillow, an accomplice in leonidas polk’s invasion of neutral Kentucky. Third in line was Simon Buckner, a marginally capable soldier who in 1854 loaned money to a penniless army buddy named Grant.186
As Union artillery, gunboats, and 27,500 troops began to slip around Donelson, Floyd opted to abandon the fort rather than be caught in a siege. He ordered Pillow to lead an escape south along the river the next morning.
Initially, the plan went well. The Confederates crashed through, peeled Grant’s right flank away from the Cumberland, and opened an escape route for the entire garrison. Then Pillow did the inexplicable. He stopped his men and ordered them back into the defenses.
History has not conclusively determined why Pillow reversed the breakthrough. Whatever the cause, his subordinates were livid. While Pillow vacillated on the south side, Grant broke through from the north. The Union army was poised to crush the entire area the following morning. Realizing their predicament, Floyd took four of his regiments and escaped by steamship in the night while Pillow and a fellow officer paddled away on a small boat. It was left to Buckner to beg his old friend Grant for mercy. Grant threw friendship aside in his infamous response: “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.” Buckner surrendered.187
Grant estimated his men captured in excess of 14,600 prisoners. Hundreds of these would-be escapees would later rot and die in the Chicago prison of CAMP DOUGLAS.188
The senior officer at Fort Donelson, John B. Floyd, was from 1857 until December 1860 the secretary of war of the United States.
4. Pickett’s Charge (Battle of Gettysburg, July 3, 1863)
Imagine a long femur bone, thick and solid at the ends, thin and breakable at the center. This is how ROBERT E. LEE envisioned the Union line by the third day at GETTYSBURG. The hip joint of Culp’s Hill and the knee joint of the Round Tops proved heavily defended on Day 2. On Day 3 Lee believed he could crack the bone at its shank of Cemetery Ridge, first blasting it with some 170 cannon, followed by a strike of massed infantry.
Lee was an aggressive commander, but most of his offensives were calculated, using surprise, cover, speed, and multiple points of attack to maximize his chances. On Day 3 at Gettysburg, Lee had no element of surprise: His artillery barrage signaled where he intended to attack. A planned diversionary assault on the Union right occurred prematurely and failed. Preliminaries aside, Lee sent foot soldiers on a frontal assault across a mile of open ground, most of it within range of enemy artillery and infantry shielded by walls and breastworks.189
At 3:00 p.m. three divisions stepped out of the woods of Seminary Ridge and marched toward eighty cannon and ten thousand Union soldiers. Of thirteen thousand Confederates to go forward, only half returned an hour later. A few hundred reached the Federal lines and were killed or captured soon after. Lee instructed George E. Pickett to brace his division for a possible counterattack. Pickett responded, “General Lee, I have no division now.” So obvious and immediate was the failure that Lee begged forgiveness from at least one officer, although perhaps not from the enlisted men as legend has suggested.190
Two months after Gettysburg, Lee offered his resignation to Jefferson Davis, which the Confederate president abruptly rejected. Lee went on to lead his weakened Army of Northern Virginia for the remainder of the conflict, but desertion from his ranks increased considerably after Gettysburg, and never again would a major invasion of the North take place.191
The name Pickett’s Charge is erroneous, as James Longstreet was the commanding officer, and the largest of the three divisions in the charge belonged to James J. Pettigrew, not Pickett.
5. Polk Enters Kentucky (September 3, 1861)
In a contest over the Mississippi River, an inept Union general almost committed one of the costliest mistakes of the war, but an equally incompetent Confederate general beat him to it.
From the outset of the war, the sprawling state of Kentucky had declared its neutrality. Presidents Lincoln and Davis both vowed to respect the wishes of their mutual birthplace. Although beneficial to both men, neutral bluegrass was as good as gold for Davis. Resting on five hundred miles of the Confederacy’s border, from western Virginia across the length of Tennessee’s vulnerable north boundary, Kentucky stood directly between the Southern heartland and five Union states. The only land avenues left into Dixie were tumultuous Missouri and the stone wall of Virginia.192
All this mattered little to the cocky Union Gen. JOHN C. FRÉMONT and the shortsighted Confederate Gen. LEONIDAS POLK. Both eyed Kentucky’s jagged western tail as prime, unclaimed real estate for controlling the mighty Mississippi. As it turned out, both generals targeted Columbus, Kentucky, a small, undefended town tucked neatly in a strategically exquisite bend in the river. Consulting neither their presidents nor their War Departments, each man positioned himself for the first strike, Polk in Union City, Tennessee, and Frémont across the waters in Belmont, Missouri.193
Polk was the first to move. He crossed the Tennessee-Kentucky border on September 3, 1861, and snuggled into Columbus the following day. Hearing of Polk’s unilateral act of political idiocy, Tennessee Gov. Isham Harris, Confederate Secretary of War Leroy Walker, and Jefferson Davis demanded Polk withdraw back to Tennessee. An indignant Polk took the orders under advisement and declined.194
Repercussions were swift. Armed with the moral high ground, Union forces took two days to occupy Paducah in the west and Frankfort in the north. In two weeks, the government of Kentucky declared allegiance to the Union. A vast roadblock to the Confederacy had become an open passage.195
Frémont’s man in charge of the Union assault force designated to attack Columbus—a promising brigadier named Grant.
6. Assault on Marye’s Heights (Battle of Fredericksburg, December 13, 1862)
By November 1862 the public and government of the North were impatient for any sign of military progress. To speed things along, Lincoln relieved the overly cautious GEORGE B. MCCLELLAN and placed the more agreeable AMBROSE E. BURNSIDE at the head of the Army of the Potomac. In short order, Burnside pressed toward Richmond via Fredericksburg with most of his army of 120,000 on hand.
Burnside lost precious days in early December while waiting for the arrival and assembly of pontoon bridges so he could cross the frigid Rappahannock. The delay gave ROBERT E. LEE plenty of time to collect and entrench most of his 75,000 men on the west side of evacuated Fredericksburg. To reinstate a factor of surprise, Burnside attempted the unfathomable: He crossed the Rappahannock anyway, heading straight toward Lee’s defenses. To add to the effect, Burnside launched multiple assaults upon the most impenetrable part of the Confederate line, a half-mile-long stone wall shielding thousands of Confederate infantry and covered by dozens of cannon on the slopes of Marye’s Heights directly behind.
The Sunken Road at the base of Marye’s Heights proved to be impregnable in December 1862.
Despite the courage of the Union infantry who would not relent, the well-protected opposition slaughtered each wave with ease. Of the 12,700 Federal soldiers killed or wounded at the one-day battle of Fredericksburg, most fell within sight of the wall. Upon learning the horrible news, Lincoln uttered his now famous lament, “If there is a worse place than Hell, I am in it.”196
As night fell on the battlefield, the Aurora Borealis could be seen overhead, a very rare occurrence that far south.
The battle of the Crater failed because the shock of the explosion awed the Union troops poised to attack as much as it stunned the Confederate defenders.
7. The Crater (Petersburg, July 30, 1864)
In June 1864, the Army of the Potomac laid siege to the defenses of Petersburg, aiming to penetrate the southern flank of a thirty-mile front protecting Richmond and its rail arteries. Impatient to get through the Rebel trenches just 150 yards away, members of the Forty-eighth Pennsylvania, many of whom were coal miners, made a suggestion. A tunnel charged with a good deal of explosives could break open the fortified line. With tacit approval from Gens. AMBROSE E. BURNSIDE, George Gordon Meade, and ULYSSES S. GRANT, the miners began their work in earnest. What resulted was an engineering marvel. The finished mine had a length of five hundred feet, complete with ventilation system. An end chamber eighty feet wide and twenty feet below the Confederate line contained eight thousand pounds of black powder.
Burnside selected and trained his largest and most rested unit, an inexperienced but motivated division of African American soldiers, to lead an assault immediately following the blast. Just hours before the planned detonation, Burnside’s immediate superior, Meade, overturned the attack order. Grant concurred, fearing abolitionist outrage should the troops suffer heavy casualties. A white division would lead the way, one chosen by lots. The shortest straw went to Brig. Gen. James Ledlie, a man of questionable competence and an alcoholic.
At 4:45 a.m., July 30, the charge went off. A deafening ball of fire and earth mushroomed into the dim morning sky. Smoke rolled, debris rained, and an entire Confederate regiment and battery disappeared. Ledlie’s division, however, did nothing for almost an hour, awed by the chasm 170 feet long, 60 feet wide, and 30 feet deep. Meanwhile, Ledlie cowered in a shelter hundreds of yards away with a bottle.
Untrained on what to do next, Ledlie’s men eventually charged into the crater rather than around it and became trapped in the powdered soil, unable to climb out in any direction. Re-forming soon after the blast, Confederates lofted volley after volley of artillery and rifle fire into the hole. In support, Burnside’s entire Ninth Corps, including his select black division, ran into the fold, creating a tangle of living and dead with nowhere to go. The shooting lasted for hours.
In total, the North lost more than four thousand killed, wounded, and missing. The South lost thirteen hundred, and their lines outside Petersburg would hold for another eight months. Grant would later call the battle of the Crater “the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war,” a comment coming after the bloodbaths of THE WILDERNESS, SPOTSYLVANIA, and COLD HARBOR.197
Two years after the battle, human remains were still visible in the CRATER.
At Cold Harbor more than seven thousand Federals fell in the first few minutes.
8. Grant’s Assaults at Cold Harbor (Cold Harbor, June 3, 1864)
To enfilade is to fire upon an enemy line from the side. Such an operation, on the rare occasion it is feasible, can be brutally effective. Shots long or short on range are still likely to fall upon the target. Only the opponent’s flank has an open line of fire for a response. To attempt an assault past enfilade is treacherous. Advancing past enfilade and upon a heavily defended position borders on the ludicrous, but that is exactly what ULYSSES S. GRANT ordered his men to do at Cold Harbor.
At 4:30 a.m. on June 3, Grant sent fifty thousand men toward entrenched and enfiladed Confederate defenses. More than seven thousand men in blue were killed or wounded in fifteen minutes. Following waves diminished in intensity as officers and men quickly realized the futility of the situation. Eight hours passed before George Gordon Meade and Grant ceased sending men. Four days passed before Grant consented to a truce for the retrieval of the wounded between the lines, but by that time most of the wounded had perished. Only later did Grant write, “I regret this assault more than any one I have ever ordered.”198
After Cold Harbor, the Army of the Potomac and Grant were never truly aggressive again. When Union forces advanced on critical Petersburg later that June, lead units outnumbered the paltry twenty-five hundred Confederates seven to one and overran the outer defenses quickly. The Federals, however, made little effort to press their advantage, and support units hesitated to aid them. The following month’s catastrophe at the Crater illustrated the indecision and apprehension of a once confident command. By the autumn of 1864, Grant still held a three-to-one advantage over the Confederates, which grew to five-to-one by the spring of 1865. Before Cold Harbor, Grant and company moved eighty miles in one month. Afterward, the grand Army of the Potomac moved ten miles in eight months. Not until ROBERT E. LEE’S units failed miserably in two desperate breakout engagements (Fort Stedman and Five Forks) did Grant order a general offensive, sweeping through Richmond and Petersburg and thus ending the longest siege in U.S. military history.
Nearly three thousand people died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; approximately the same number died in the first fifteen minutes at Cold Harbor.
9. Hooker’s Switch to the Defensive (Chancellorsville, May 1–4, 1863)
It looked as if ROBERT E. LEE and the Army of Northern Virginia were finally trapped. Facing them were forty thousand Federal troops near the old battleground of FREDERICKSBURG. Sweeping around the Confederate left were fifty-five thousand more men led by AMBROSE E. BURNSIDE’S new replacement, the brash and confident Joseph Hooker.199
Union morale was ablaze. Lee was not moving, seemingly unable to advance or withdraw, on the verge of being surrounded. Yet as Hooker’s men began to close in behind Lee’s forces and encountered predictable resistance, Hooker suddenly lost his nerve. He ordered his advancing columns to withdraw back to the crossroads of tiny CHANCELLORSVILLE. Union officers and men were baffled. Not only did their commander surrender a very rare opportunity to crush Lee, he also backed himself into a veritable trap. Massive thickets and dark forests surrounding Chancellorsville rendered Hooker’s artillery practically impotent. Worse, the heavy woods made enemy positions, numbers, and movements almost invisible. Rather than act on reports that Lee had divided his army into several disjointed parts, Hooker remained stationary, convinced that the opposition was actually retreating.200
As Lee began his sudden and simultaneous attacks on May 2, Hooker panicked, gave up high ground, and withdrew even farther. When the battle resumed the next day, a Confederate shell crashed within feet of Hooker. Despite showing signs of a concussion, he refused to relinquish command. Later on, when Union forces at Fredericksburg broke through infamous MARYE’S HEIGHTS to rescue his wing, Hooker made no effort to join them. By May 6 Hooker backed over the Rappahannock, whipped, bloodied, and disgraced.
Chancellorsville proved to be Lee’s greatest fight and the apex of the Confederate movement, yet the moment would not have been possible without the consent and cooperation of a general who before this engagement had been known as “Fighting Joe.”201
Hooker got his nickname when a newspaper covering his progress in the Peninsula campaign used the headline “Fighting—Joe Hooker.”
For more than three hours Burnside’s corps was stalled at the bridge that now bears his name. Here fewer than six hundred Georgians held off twelve thousand Federals, wreaking five hundred casualties.
10. Burnside’s Bridge (Antietam, September 17, 1862)
Ideally, an avenue of attack includes natural and/or weaponry cover, wide approaches to accommodate the numbers involved, and secure rear areas for prompt reinforcement or withdrawal. Outside Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, 1862, AMBROSE E. BURNSIDE used the worst avenue of attack of the entire war.
Over open ground, under heavy enemy fire, and with minimal artillery support, Burnside attempted to send his Ninth Corps, twelve thousand men, over Antietam Creek by way of a single arching stone bridge less than thirteen feet wide. He tried, not once or twice, but four times.
By using the bridge, Burnside presented a small and compact target that could not fan out to return effective fire, move wounded to the rear, or provide any cover to the thousands behind them in cue. Cutting them down with deadly effect was former Confederate Secretary of State Robert A. Toombs and his fellow Georgians, fewer than five hundred men, outnumbered twenty to one.
Union forces did manage to cross the creek three hours later when they discovered they could wade across the Antietam a few hundred yards upstream. Their success was short lived, however. Coming up from Harpers Ferry, A. P. Hill and three thousand Confederates (several of them wearing captured blue uniforms) smashed into Burnside’s left flank, killing hundreds before nightfall.202
More than two thousand men in blue were casualties, and vital time was lost. An inept execution of an inept order negated the chance for a quick and massive advance. What could have been a rout turned out to be a costly and marginal win.203
Burnside later became the first president of the National Rifle Association.
Popular history may characterize the Civil War as a flourish of opportunity for women. The case is marginally true. In 1861 only 25 percent of the nation’s primary and secondary teachers were female, a ratio increased to 50 percent by 1865. Women held 25 percent of the manufacturing jobs at the start of the war, and almost 33 percent by the end. Hundreds of new civil service appointments opened up, particularly in the Treasury Departments of both governments. The medical profession reluctantly gave ground to female participation, especially in the North.204
In most instances, these new job opportunities came from a chronic shortage of labor. For all of their progress, women faced a litany of challenges. They were universally compelled to accept lower pay, often half that of men. Harassment was common, sexual and otherwise. Female nurses were just as susceptible to illness as the soldiers they tended. Working with typhoid cases was especially dangerous, killing scores. Hundreds worked in munitions, where the dangers of the workplace went beyond inequality. A Richmond laboratory explosion killed forty women. A Washington arsenal fire consumed nineteen. 205
For the most part, women still remained heavily ensconced in the domestic sphere, where the labor was often arduous. The mid-nineteenth century home was less of a domicile and more of an office, commissary, school, hospital, and for many families, a factory, functions that often intensified during the unprecedented national crisis.
Thus, most heroines of the war remain unsung. Of the two million slave and fifteen million free women involved, fame usually fell upon the unmerited, such as the self-promoting spy Belle Boyd or the privileged and untested diarist Mary Chesnut. Below are standouts among the often overlooked, who risked their financial, professional, or physical safety in the service of their country and cause. Directly or indirectly, most advanced women’s status in male-dominated environments. All inspired a generation with their courage and commitment.206
1. Clara Barton (Massachusetts, 1821–1912)
Throughout the war and on both sides, eight out of every ten nurses were men, and very few traveled to the front lines. Clara Barton made herself the exception. Five feet tall, of light build, with a soft voice and a relentless work ethic, she was an odd fusion of unbound tenderness and absolute tenacity.
Thirty-nine years old when the war broke out, she witnessed soldiers of FIRST MANASSAS (First Bull Run) returning from the battlefield. Some of the wounded had walked the twenty-three miles back to Washington for lack of ambulances. Caring for the men with supplies from her own home, she vowed to become a nurse.207
Affiliated with no organization or charity, she served in several battles, including SECOND MANASSAS, FREDERICKSBURG, Battery Wagner, and THE WILDERNESS. Chartering wagons, collecting food and medicine, helping with surgeries, and dressing wounds, she personified calm resilience. Remarkably focused under fire, she often found her clothes drenched with blood and pierced by lead. At ANTIETAM, Barton was caring for a wounded soldier when a bullet passed through her sleeve and into his chest, killing him instantly.208
A divinity to the enlisted, perhaps her greatest service was to the families of those missing in action. Late in the war, Lincoln enlisted her to identify the unknown buried at ANDERSONVILLE. With a team of forty headboard makers and other assistants, a burial list, and thousands of feet of pine board, she helped mark and catalog more than 12,000 graves, and managed to identify all but 451 of the interred.209
Continuing her assignment at other sites, she encountered constant obstruction. Leading her detractors was the U.S. War Department, unappreciative of her divulging its lethargy in assisting families of missing veterans. Despite the challenges, including tremendous personal debt, she and her crew wrote and received tens of thousands of letters, and identified nearly as many graves. Such a service was particularly important to widows and dependents. Aside from learning the fate of their loved ones, they could collect pensions, as the government required proof of death before payment. Yet by Barton’s own calculations, at least forty thousand Union dead had no known burial place and would remain missing forever.210
After the war, she traveled as a public speaker, sharing her experiences and supporting veterans programs. To one audience, she revealed the extent of her tolerance for battle: “Men have worshipped war, till it has cost a million times more than the whole world in worth, poured out the best blood and crushed the fairest forms the good God has ever created…All through and through, thought, and act, body and soul—I hate it.”211
Barton went on to become the founder and first president of the American Association of the Red Cross. She continued her work as a nurse during the Spanish-American War at the age of seventy-seven.212
Although the War Department routinely undermined her services during and after the Civil War, the American public was far more appreciative. For generations, hundreds of newborn girls were named Clara Barton.
2. Mary Ann Bickerdyke (Ohio, 1817–1901)
For both armies, nursing was an afterthought. Soldiers physically or mentally incapable of combat service were often charged with hospital duty. Training was minimal or nonexistent, and the orderlies served on a rotational basis. Neglect, theft, and abuse of patients were prevalent.213
Into this scene came widowed Quaker Mary Ann Bickerdyke, a stocky, unpolished, and fierce opponent of the Union Medical Bureau. Examining a row of overcrowded hospital tents at a Union camp in Illinois, she labored to contain her anger: “The mud floor was foul with human excrement… patients lay in shirts and underdrawers, filthy with vomit, rank with perspiration.”214
Bickerdyke immediately rectified the situation. She obtained better food and living conditions for the men, organized kitchens, established wash teams, replaced beddings, dressings, and clothes, assisted with surgeries, and fired anyone who resisted, despite having no authority to do so. Traveling with ULYSSES S. GRANT’S forces to FORT DONELSON and VICKSBURG, she quickly earned the admiration of the enlisted and emphasized to doctors and soldiers alike the relationship between cleanliness and health. When officers or surgeons complained of her iron-fisted tactics, both Grant and WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN advised them to step aside. Grant commented to one objector, “Mother Bickerdyke outranks everybody, even Lincoln.”215
On his Atlanta campaign, Sherman specifically requested her help for the Fifteenth Corps, permitting her to trade, demand, and confiscate anything needed for “her boys.” At the conclusion of the war, for the Grand Review of the Armies, Sherman instructed Bickerdyke to ride in the parade at the head of the grateful Fifteenth.216
Bickerdyke served all four years and in nineteen battle zones. Remaining with her corps until the last soldier was discharged in 1866, she labored the rest of her life, assisting veterans from coast to coast. Alternately called a cyclone, a tornado, and a damned nuisance, she preferred the name the men awarded her—Mother.217
For her fast and furious commitment to the service, the U.S. government granted Mother Bickerdyke a pension of three hundred dollars a year, which she did not receive until 1886.
3. Orders of Catholic Nuns
During the height of a battle, Confederate soldiers sighted unarmed women entering the field. One exclaimed, “My God!…What are they doing down there? They’ll be killed.” A compatriot informed him, “Those are the Sisters. They are looking for the wounded. They are not afraid of anything.”218
Before the war the largest military hospital was in Kansas, boasting a total of forty beds. At the same time the Catholic Church operated nearly thirty hospitals across the country. While nursing schools would not appear in the United States until the 1870s, the sisterhood had a tradition of nursing dating back to the Middle Ages. To a society frightened by the prospect of untrained, unmarried, unchaperoned ladies caring for armies of grown men, the nuns appeared as heaven-sent.219
Among them were the Sisters of Mercy from Shelby Springs, Alabama, the Sisters of St. Dominic out of Memphis, and the Sisters of Charity from Cincinnati. An order from Emmitsburg, Maryland, traveled to GETTYSBURG, gathered the wounded, blessed the dead, and assisted surgeries done in Gettysburg’s St. Francis Xavier Church.220
More than six hundred sisters from a dozen orders served throughout the war, and yet they were ridiculed. Catholic among a predominantly Protestant citizenry, most were also foreign-born, lending an air of suspicion to their presence. Additionally, the sisters served on both sides, making no distinction between Union and Confederate. A common accusation against them was that of espionage. Yet the majority of surgeons, civilians, and soldiers were grateful. Jefferson Davis thanked the orders for their work in the Confederacy’s “darkest days.” Lincoln added, “They were veritable angels of mercy.”221
Catholic nuns tended to the wounded and sick of the American Revolution and the War of 1812. During the Crimean War, the majority of Florence Nightingale’s crew of thirty-eight nurses were members of Anglican and Catholic sisterhoods.
4. Harriet Tubman (Maryland, 1821(?)–1913)
Born into slavery as Araminta Ross, she escaped from slave state Maryland and arrived in Pennsylvania in 1849 alone and penniless. Two years later she began the first of nineteen journeys southward, risking reenslavement and death, leading by some estimates 270 people to freedom. In ten years on the Underground Railroad, she was never caught and “never lost a passenger.” In 1861 Washington actively sought her talents.222
Her admirers included cabinet members William H. Seward and Edwin M. Stanton. Consequently, Tubman moved through the lines and among the camps with considerable freedom. Assisting the military as a spy, scout, and nurse, she worked primarily in South Carolina. Coordinating the assistance of local freedmen and slaves, she labored to improve the care of refugee slaves, collected intelligence for the military, and sought out any opportunity to find and free more people. On one occasion she quadrupled her antebellum tally, liberating 756 slaves during an expeditionary raid.223
After the war she returned to her adopted home in Auburn, New York. In spite of continual poverty, she raised money for freedmen remaining in the South, endorsed women’s rights, and in 1908 opened a home for the aged and poor.
Her distinguished life forged associations with Ralph Waldo Emerson, FREDERICK DOUGLASS, THOMAS GARRETT, WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON, and WENDELL PHILLIPS. Her friend JOHN BROWN referred to her as “General” and considered her “one of the best and bravest persons on this continent.”224
Tubman managed to be a spy, nurse, scout, suffragette, and rescuer despite being illiterate.
5. Mary Livermore (Massachusetts, 1820–1905)
Of the many private organizations North and South, the U.S. Sanitary Commission was by far the largest. Lincoln sanctioned the commission in the first summer of the war, permitting what he called the “fifth wheel to the coach” to review camps and hospitals, report their findings, and nothing more. Yet it became clear early on that the U.S. military, designed to handle a peacetime strength of sixteen thousand, was wholly unprepared to care for a volunteer force of more than a half-million.225
After inspecting decrepit camps, inadequate supply networks, and squalid hospitals, the Sanitary Commission became a volunteer force of its own, growing to five hundred officers (mostly men) and more than ten thousand volunteers (mostly women, including MARY BICKERDYKE). Among its executives was editor, teacher, activist, and preacher’s wife Mary Livermore of Chicago, who embodied the commission’s objective of bringing rations, medicines, and better living conditions for every Union soldier.
After cofounding a chapter in her hometown, she became a national director. Traveling across the North, she recruited doctors, nurses, businessmen, and veteran’s families, organized charity drives, collected and shipped provisions for the enlisted, and chartered thousands of branch offices. Leading the fight against an inflexible and outdated military Medical Bureau, she helped make the Sanitary Commission a bountiful provider for the legions of servicemen who depended upon it for survival.226
There was one female reporter at the 1860 Republican National Convention: the multitalented Mary Ashton Livermore.
6. Sally Louisa Tompkins (Virginia, 1833–1916)
The Southern celebration of the feminine ideal had a decidedly negative effect. When it came time to mobilize a nursing corps, the turnout was alarmingly low, and most Confederate hospital orderlies throughout the war were slaves.227
Among the exceptions was Sally Louisa Tompkins. A Richmond philanthropist, she converted a judge’s home in the Confederate capital into a hospital where she and six assistants took in the wounded of FIRST MANASSAS.
As Virginia became a vast war zone, so Richmond became an extensive network of makeshift hospitals. Few, however, rivaled the efficiency and reputation of Tompkins’s ward. To lend power to her practice, Jefferson Davis gave her the rank of captain. She refused the pay but used the rank to procure rations and supplies.228
From August 1861 to April 1865 she and her staff received more than thirteen hundred cases, many of them severe. The hospital kept all but seventy-three men alive, an astounding achievement, considering the overall Confederate average of deaths from wounds was four times higher. Continuing her work well after Appomattox, she gradually resumed her prewar commitment to social charity.229
Sally Louisa Tompkins was the only woman given an officer’s commission in the Confederate military.
7. Dorothea Dix (Maine, 1802–87)
At sixty years of age and a famous advocate for medical reform, especially for the care of the mentally ill, authoritative and inexhaustible Dorothea Dix was a reasonable choice for superintendent of the U.S. Women Nurses Corps.
In her recruiting efforts, Dix established strict guidelines for prospective attendants: “No woman under thirty years need apply to serve in government hospitals. All nurses are required to be very plain looking women.” She also imposed restrictions on dress, travel, and socializing.230
In her own words, she revealed the dichotomy of Dix. Opinionated, terse, arbitrarily selective in times of desperate nursing shortages, she eventually alienated a large portion of her male and female colleagues. At the same time, she forced efficiency upon a slipshod medical department, selected the best available caretakers within her narrow criteria, and secured pay for them while never accepting her own wages. Overall she managed a staff of more than two thousand—roughly equivalent to a brigade—all the while attempting to remove prejudice against women and bring a superior level of care to the men.231
Dispossessed of most of her authority by the end of the war, she resigned her position in September 1865. Dix returned to her pioneering work in the betterment of care for the mentally ill, finally retiring when she reached her eightieth year.232
U.S. Medical Bureau officials selected Dorothea Dix as superintendent of nurses over a more qualified nominee—Elizabeth Blackwell, the first trained female physician in American history (Geneva Medical College, 1849).
8. Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York, 1815–1902) and Susan B. Anthony (Massachusetts, 1820–1906)
Elizabeth Cady grew up around her father’s New York law office, where she saw numerous married women ask for help against abusive husbands only to be told they had no legal recourse. Susan Brownwell developed a deep sense of independence while working her family farm outside Rochester, New York. Both were involved in social reform for years before meeting in 1851. Thereafter, they teamed together and became the most prominent voices for women’s rights in the nineteenth century.233
Stanton, the more extroverted and articulate of the two, handled the lion’s share of writing and public speaking, while Anthony performed most of the managerial duties. Ardent abolitionists, they paralleled the plight of marriage with slavery. Specifics varied by state, but betrothed women had limited or no control over their own money and property. In several states, physical abuse was insufficient grounds for divorce. In matters of dress, speech, and child-bearing, obedience was expected. The overriding concern, Anthony informed a fellow activist, “was Human Rights—not Woman’s Rights.”234
During the war Anthony and Stanton minimized their message of gender issues and focused on abolition. Annoyed by the minimal scope of Lincoln’s emancipation edict, they formed the Women’s National Loyal League, supporting the Union but calling for total emancipation. The two petitioned for the eradication of slavery from the Constitution and collected four hundred thousand signatures for what would become the thirteenth amendment.235
Yet the end of the war did not bring the social transformations they had hoped for. In response, Stanton and Anthony founded the National Women’s Suffrage Association and continued their lifelong mission for equal rights and opportunity. Together they ushered a gradual public recognition of women’s issues and encouraged individuals to grant themselves the right of self-determination. Sadly, neither lived to see the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment and its establishment of female suffrage.
Created by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the National Women’s Suffrage Association changed its name in 1920 to the League of Women Voters.
9. Annie Etheridge (Wisconsin, 1840–1913)
Born Lorinda Anna Blair, she came to be known as “Gentle Anna,” a selfless caretaker of Michigan’s soldiers.
When her husband, James Etheridge, joined the Second Michigan, she volunteered as a nurse. Through FIRST MANASSAS, SECOND MANASSAS, ANTIETAM, FREDERICKSBURG, CHANCELLORSVILLE, GETTYSBURG, and SPOTSYLVANIA, she served the Second, Third, and Fifth Michigan, among others. On hospital ships, in camp, on the move, the sunny, reticent, yet restless Anna shared the same food, slept on the same ground, and marched the same miles as the enlisted. Several holes in her clothes attested to her indifference to gunfire. Similar to clara barton’s Antietam experience, Etheridge was caring for a soldier on the front lines of Fredericksburg when shrapnel struck and killed him.236
In 1864 ULYSSES S. GRANT streamlined his operations and ordered women away from the Army of the Potomac. Officers of all ranks signed a petition asking Grant to make an exception for Etheridge. Grant did not, and Etheridge worked at the City Point Hospital during the long siege of Petersburg.237
After the war Etheridge continued to serve her regiments. Working in the U.S. Pension Office, she secured annuities for Michigan veterans, war widows, and their dependents.
Annie Etheridge died in 1913. In recognition of her service and sacrifice to the Union army, the U.S. government buried her with full honors in Arlington National Cemetery.
10. Kate Cumming (Scotland, 1828–1909)
As the war entered its second year, twenty-seven-year-old Kate Cumming struggled with an inconsistency. England’s Florence Nightingale had many admirers, and yet many deemed it socially unacceptable to emulate her work.238
When Cumming learned of a deadly battle at SHILOH, she traveled from her home in Mobile, Alabama, to the Confederate base at Corinth, Mississippi. Against her family’s wishes, she went to care for the wounded. For ten straight days she changed bandages, gathered food and water, searched in vain for medicines, and never had the opportunity to change out of her blood-soaked dress.
After returning briefly to Mobile, she assisted the Army of the Tennessee for the rest of the war, first as a nurse and then as one of the few field-hospital matrons of the South. Although not alone in her sacrifices, she was unique in one respect. She publicly questioned the commitment of Confederate women: “Are the women of the South going into the hospitals? I am afraid candor will compel me to say they are not!” Of those restricted by age or health, she wondered why so many did not bother to sew shirts, send food, darn socks, or wrap bandages. “I have no patience with women whom I hear telling what wonder they would do if they were only men, when I see much of their legitimate work left undone.” Many accepted her challenge and committed themselves to uncharted territory.239
Following the war, she wrote A Journal of Hospital Life, one of the most precise and insightful renditions of medical care in the Confederacy and an astute dismantling of Southern womanhood’s china-doll image. After its publication, she became a schoolteacher, participated in veterans’ affairs, and urged women to care for the disfigured and disabled veterans of the South.240
The consummate Southern nationalist, Kate Cumming was born in Scotland, immigrated with her family to New York, then moved to Montreal before settling in Alabama.
